Pestalozzi and elementary education

PESTALOZZI

PIONEERS IN EDUCATION

PESTALOZZI

AND ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

BY

GABRIEL COMPAYRE

CORRESPONDENT OP THE INSTITUTE ; DIRECTOR OF THE ACADEMY

OF LYONS; AUTHOR OF "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO
EDUCATION," "LECTURES ON PEDAGOC

ETC

TRANSLATED BY
R. P. JAGO

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NEW YORK

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.

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COPYEIGHT, 1907,

BY THOMAS T. CKOWELL & COMPANY.
PUBLISHED, SBPTEMBEK, 1907.

CONTENTS AND SUMMAET

PAGE

PREFACE vii

I. Pestalozzi and Herbart. — How Pestalozzi deserves to be

studied in himself. — His great fame. — A militant
teacher. — He can be defined as a philanthropist of
education. — Recrudescence of his renown in Switzer
land, during these last years 3

II. Zurich at the period when Pestalozzi was studying there

(1764). — A hot-bed of literary studies. — Centre of a
political and social movement. — Influence of Rous
seau's writings. — Pestalozzi a youthful revolutionary.

— His belief in democracy. — Home training. — Pesta
lozzi the pupil of his mother. — Precocious experience of
the miseries of the people. — His marriage. — His wife's
character. — How Pestalozzi became an educator. —
Education of his son his first pedagogical experience. —
The Journal d'un pere. — Hesitations between the prin
ciple of authority and the principle of liberty. — "I
wish only to be a schoolmaster." . . . 9

III. Neuhof (1768-1780). — Agricultural and industrial at
tempts. — Why Pestalozzi went to the country people.

— Financial ruin. — Establishment of the refuge for
poor children. — Association of manual labour and ele
mentary instruction. — A school of abnormal children.

— Heroic efforts. — Definite check to the enterprise
(1780) 19

IV. Stans. — Eighteen years of discouragement, from
1780 to 1798. — Pestalozzi the writer. — List of his

iii

iv CONTENTS AND SUMMARY

PAGE

works. — The Helvetic Revolution. — The orphanage
at Stans (1798). — Peculiar difficulties of the work: a
heretic, a revolutionary, is sent to a Catholic and
reactionary people. — Wretched introduction. — Pesta
lozzi 's moral action. — His enthusiasm for France. —
Methods pursued and results obtained. — Wonderful
activity. — Pestalozzi exhausted by his efforts. —
Closing of the orphanage (1799). — A visit to Stans in
1901 28

V. Burgdorf and Yverdon (1800-1825). — Pestalozzi, at

fifty-two, assistant teacher in a school for children. —
He receives promotion. — He becomes superintendent
of the "Burgdorf Educational Institute."-— His first
collaborators : Krusi, Buss, and Tobler. — Other collab
orators. — Special branches of teaching. — The Burg
dorf Institute transferred to Mimchenbuchsee (1804),
then to Yverdon (1805). — Everything taught. —
Pestalozzi does not, however, give up the achievement
of his "Method" of elementary instruction. — Bril
liant success of the Yverdon Institute. — Influx of
visiting strangers. — Pestalozzi seeks the support of
the chiefs of state. — His visits to the emperor of Rus
sia and to the king of Prussia. — A school day at Yver
don. — A cosmopolitan college. — Interior troubles. —
Internal dissensions. — Rivalry of Schmid and Nie-
derer. — Attacks from without. — Pestalozzi's religion.
— His philosophic deism. — Pestalozzi and Rousseau
compared. — Closing of the Institute (1825). — Last
days at Neuhof. — Death of Pestalozzi (February 17,
1827) . .41

VI. The method and the practice. — Pestalozzi's uncer
tainties. — His commentators. — Intuition the starting-
point of all knowledge and of all instruction. — Intuition
of the senses and moral intuition. — The " art of intui-

CONTENTS AND SUMMARY v

PAGE

tion." — The principle of gradation and of concentration.

— Study of the human body, first exercise of intuition
and of language. — Intensive development of the fac
ulties of more importance than the extension of positive
knowledge. — The faculties grow with exercise. — In
terest in the study a necessary condition to intellectual
progress. — Conversation with Bell. — Simplifying of
the Method. — The Method-machine. — Pestalozzi's
practice often at variance with his principles. — Abuse
of the device of object lessons. — The bees and the
flowers. — Criticism of the theory " of the number, the
shape, and the word."- -The Burgdorf tapestry and
language exercises. — Fresh form of verbiage. —
Drawing studied geometrically. — Ravaisson's opinion.

— Intuition in the study of geography. — Mental calcula
tion. — Many educators of the present day are Pestaloz-
zians without knowing it. — Reading made subordinate
to oral exercises. — The movable letters. — Drawing
before writing. — Arithmetic and geometry taught
experimentally. — The technical ABC. — Moral edu
cation based on intuition and experience. — Develop
ment of the sentiments in the child. — Education should
be continued kindness. — The leading role of the mother.

— Religious education. — Pestalozzi's work limited to
elementary education 63

VII. Pestalozzi's influence. — Diesterweg and the celebra
tion of the anniversary of his birth (January 12, 1846).

— Immediate propagation of his doctrines. — A gather
ing at Mme. de Stael's. — His influence in Germany. —
Fichte and Froebel. — Pestalozzian schools in Berlin,
Frankfort, etc. — Pestalozzianism in Spain. — Come-
nius and Pestalozzi. — Importation of his methods into
Denmark and England. — The Lettres a Greaves sur I' edu
cation elementaire. — Pestalozzian experiments in Amer-

vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY

PAGE

ica and France. — How Pestalozzi has been compared
to nearly all the educational theorists. — Application
of his methods by practical workers . . . . 100

VIII. The author and the man. — Defects and qualities of
his writings. — His def ectiveness in the presentation of
abstract truths. — His talent as a narrator. — Leonard
et Gertrude and the popular novel. — The ironical note.
— View of social policy. — The right of property. —
Utopias. — His estimation of printing and of the Protes
tant Reformation. — Burning eloquence. — The virtues
of the man. — His courage. — His disinterestedness. —
His sufferings. — Mme. Pestalozzi. — Hours of happi
ness. — He dreamed more than he accomplished. —
Schools in Pestalozzi 's time. — A Swiss educator in
1795. — The lay school. — Pestalozzi's moral great
ness 118

BIBLIOGRAPHY . .137

PEEFACE

IN placing the name of Pestalozzi after those of
Rousseau and Spencer, in the list of great educators,
we render rightful tribute to a man of heart, a
man of action, praiseworthy in both, who is not
well enough known in France, where he is by turns
cried down, neglected, or unduly exalted, but who,
impartially judged, merits one of the chief places in
the golden book of the history of education.

Was it not of him that the English Andrew
Bell — who, however, did not appreciate his
methods of instruction — said : " He is a man of
experience, enthusiasm, and genius " ? Was it not
him that the German Diesterweg hailed as the
"Father of the public school"?

Pestalozzi has been the direct descendant of
Rousseau. J.-P. Richter, in his Levana, wrote in
1806: "And still Pestalozzi continues among the
people the work of Rousseau." But although the
author of Emile has had only one descendant, even
an imaginary one, Pestalozzi has brought up millions
of children ; and he has trained the masters no less

vii

viii PREFACE

than he has instructed the pupils. He has had an
extraordinary influence upon the education of his
day, which has continued throughout the years of
the past century. In 1861 the Society of Teachers
of Berlin did not hesitate to make this declaration :
" We are convinced that the happy results of the
present time in our schools, obtained despite the
official red tape/' -the famous Code of 1853, —
" are due in large measure to the corps of teachers
who have been grounded in the principles of
Pestalozzi."

Pestalozzi is undoubtedly the creator of the idea,
as well as the fact, of the new school, the promoter
of modern pedagogy. He has dreamed, he has de
sired, the school universal, the school free alike to
rich and poor, just as the Church or Temple is open
to people of every condition. And in order to bring
about the accomplishment of his dream, he has de
voted, sacrificed his life. He has laboured only for
others. He has spent his days, to the weakening,
despoiling, and ruining of both body and mind,
in the service of humanity, of humanity down
trodden and oppressed. It is to the lowly and the
little ones especially that he has dedicated the sen
timents of his heart and the fruits of his strength,
burning for the rights and liberty of the people, and
for their honour and happiness.

PREFACE ix

In choosing the sub-title for this study, we might
therefore have well written, " Pestalozzi, and Popu
lar Education." But it was not to the people alone
that he addressed himself ; and in his teaching he
has not been concerned merely with the simple edu
cation of children, sons of the common people, of
workmen, or of peasants. Similarly, if we con
sidered one of the essential principles of his
method, it would not be incorrect to say, " Pesta-
lozzi, and Intuitive Education," since he is the real
initiator of the Lemons de Choses.

On the other hand, if we had preferred to define
the character of his work as that of intuition, to
which he attached some importance, it is after all
not the point of departure for his system of teach
ing. We think that we have responded better to
his ideas, and have at the same time conformed to
his exact terms, when we assign as his especial
domain, "Elementary Education," that which fixes
the first instruction of the child in letters and
morals. "Elementary Education" -that is in
deed the constant goal of the indefatigable activity
of Pestalozzi. He has not laboured when he felt
moved only by his inspiration, and when the circum
stances have imposed upon him a role to his liking ;
he has laboured only for childhood. He has excelled
in the art of training the child in the life intel-

x PREFACE

lectual and moral. " That which takes chief place
in my aspirations is the first impulse of my youth
for the people and for childhood/' he asserted. In
his last work, The Swan Song, he devotes two hun
dred pages to analyzing the development of the
idea of Elementarbildung . In the discourse which
he prepared, some time before his death, for the
Societe Helvetique, which had proclaimed him its
president, it is with insistence that he reverts again
to the fixed idea of " Elementary Education."

His real glory has been not merely in the inspir
ing of one class of the world's employees, the school
master ; it is in the school itself, in the elementary
school, that he would have liked to spend all his
life. It is by the side of the schoolhouse that he
desired to sleep his last sleep.

"I desire that they lay me down beneath the
eaves of the school ; that they write merely my
name on the stone which receives my ashes ; and
when the raindrops have partly effaced the letters,
mankind will deal more justly with me, perhaps,
than they have during my life."

The appeal which Pestalozzi, out of his sorrows
and misfortunes, addressed to future generations,
to repair the injustice of certain of his contempo
raries, has been heard. If his life was one of hard
ship, posterity has dealt kindly with him ; and it

PREFACE xi

is in order to contribute in our turn to the grate
ful homage and admiration due him, that we have
written the following pages which, though brief,
yet present the most complete picture of the dra
matic episodes of his career, of his heroic life, and
of his immortal work.

PESTALOZZI

"!T is in Herbart that Pestalozzi must be studied,"
said Doctor Mager, a German author ; doubtless in
the way that Socrates is studied in Plato. If, indeed,
we wish to follow up some of Pestalozzi's concep
tions in their philosophic development, it is perhaps
to Herbart that we should address ourselves. He
had visited Pestalozzi, in 1799, at his Burgdorf
school ; he had seen him at work ; and it cannot be
denied that he drew inspiration, on certain points,
from the principles of the Pestalozzian method, of
which he spoke favourably in three small works,
published in 1802 and 1804.1 The desire to establish
between them the relation of master to disciple,
and the claim to connect closely two minds which
hardly resemble one another, a deep, subtle theorist
and a sentimental, enthusiastic educator, would
be unwarranted. If Pestalozzi, before he died, had

1 The most important of these three monographs is entitled :
Pestalozzis Idee eines ABC des Anschauungsunterrichts und
wissenschqftlich ausgefuhrt. Gottingen, 1802.

3

4 PESTALOZZI

had time to read Herbart's works, — but he himself
tells us that he did not open a book in the last fifty
years of his life, — if he had become acquainted
with Pedagogic generate, which dates from 1806,
it is probable that he would have exclaimed, some
what like Socrates concerning Plato: "What fine
things this young man imagines that I never thought
of! ,;.»"

It is in himself — in his character, his life, and
his actions — that Pestalozzi deserves to be studied.
If to Rousseau he owes a part of his inspiration, none
the less for that is the great Swiss teacher an ini
tiator, an innovator; and if, moreover, his doctrine
remained incomplete and confused, it has its par
ticular value all the same. Let us add that by anno
tations and attempts at its interpretation, it has
often been disfigured. In a sense, also, it is per
missible to invert the aphorism which we have
quoted and to say: "In order to understand Her-
bart and the other educational philosophers, it is
as well to have a preliminary knowledge of Pesta
lozzi."

Michelet, in Nos Fils, hails him as one of the evan
gelists of modern pedagogics. R. H. Quick, in his
Educational Re formers, declares him to have been "the
most celebrated of educational reformers." Karl
Schmidt, in his Geschichte der Erziehung, calls him

PESTALOZZI 5

"the king of pedagogics, the prophet of the new
education." I do not think that the history of edu
cation can show us another figure of such original
ity, such a touching physiognomy, such an example
of impassioned devotion to the education of the peo
ple. His long life of fourscore years was dominated
by a single thought, the regeneration of humanity
by education. "All my life I have desired/' he
wrote in 1801, " and to-day I still desire one thing
alone: the welfare of my beloved people whose
wretchedness I feel as it is felt by few." He was
himself wretched. And his heroic life of suffering,
humiliation, and sacrifice surpasses in its sad reality
everything that the novelists of the school have
been able to imagine in our times, when recounting
the misfortunes of Jean Coste or those of the Insti-
tutrice de village.

He was not merely a theoretical pedagogue,
calmly drawing up on paper projects of reform, with
out taking the trouble to apply them. He was not
satisfied, like Rousseau, with a platonic philan
thropy, manifested only by fine words. He was
above all a man of action, a militant teacher; and
it is not his fault that he was not a simple school
master all his life. It was not alone the progress
of instruction for its own sake that concerned him.
He worked, acted, and suffered for the happiness

6 PESTALOZZI

of mankind. He wished to prepare a better-edu
cated humanity, so that it might be happier and
more virtuous. If it were said that he was a philan
thropist of pedagogics, and, as it were, the Saint
Vincent de Paul of education, the description would
be very accurate.

For an immediate realization of the work carried
on by a pedagogue, of whom the English professor,
Joseph Payne, could say that "of all educators, he
is the one whose influence has been the deepest
and the most penetrating," it is sufficient to scan
the enormous list of works written by biographers
or close critics on his life and work. With Pesta-
lozzian books alone a rich library could be formed.
Germany has devoted hundreds of volumes to him.
In France, it is true, his name has been pronounced
more often than his ideas have been studied. It
must not be forgotten, however, that whilst he was
still alive, when Fichte, in his famous Discours a
la nation allemande, declared that he expected the
salvation and regeneration of his country from the
application of Pestalozzian methods, French voices
also were raised in Pestalozzi's honour. In 1810,
Madame de Stael wrote in her book, De V Allemagne,
that "Pestalozzi's school was one of the best insti
tutions of the century;" and some years earlier,
in 1807, Maine de Biran, then sub-prefect of Bergerac,

PESTALOZZI 7

endeavoured to introduce and acclimatize the new
method, which he esteemed most highly, in the
schools of Dordogne.

A hundred years old, Pestalozzi's renown has not
faded. His glory shines especially in his native
land, where he is the object of a kind of cult. It even
seems that these last years have seen, as it were, a
recrudescence and a resurrection of the homage ren
dered to him. It was on the 12th of January, 1846,
the anniversary of his birthday, that his compa
triots raised to him at Birr, in Aargau, the first
monument of their gratitude. In the last twenty
years, however, proofs of admiration have been
multiplied; in Zurich and Yverdon statues have
been erected to him; in Burgdorf a medallion and
a commemorative tablet have been dedicated to
his memory ; in Zurich, again, it was under the pat
ronage of his name that, about 1875, the academic
museum, the Pestalozzianum, was instituted. And
to these monuments perpetuating his memory are
added very significant trifles, bearing witness that
the affection of the people is ever his. In Zurich,
I went into a bookseller's ; there I found postcards
adorned with his portrait. I sat down at a restau
rant table ; the menu presented some of the scenes
of his scholastic life. ... In the Pestalozzianum,
beside his manuscripts and books, I was shown some

8 PESTALOZZI

of his relics, collected by pious hands, — his stick,
his snuff-box, a lock of his hair, his diploma as
Doctor of Breslau University, conferred on him in
1817. . . . What, however, is worth more than
all these material monuments, is that the operation
of his thought is still alive and circulates from school
to school. What, moreover, has contributed, in
recent times, to revive his popularity, is the fine
work of Mr. L.-W. Seyffarth, who, after publishing,
from 1869 to 1872, a complete edition of Pesta-
lozzi's works, is occupied in preparing a fresh one,
in which he has brought together a certain number
of important writings hitherto unpublished.

II

ZURICH, at the period when Pestalozzi was going
through his studies there, was a hot-bed of intellec
tual life. Never had "the Athens of the Limmat,"
as it is sometimes called, better justified this some
what ambitious title. It was the time when Zurich
was competing with Leipzig, and Bodmer with
Gottsched, when Zurich's writers were making their
names known in ever wider circles. In 1756, Gess-
ner published his Idylles; in 1767, Lavater, who was
Pestalozzi's friend, composed his Chants suisses, an
attempt at popular lyric poetry. Again, it was the
time when Zurich was becoming the meeting-place
of the German poets. Wieland accepted Bodmer's
hospitality there in 1753; and before him, in 1750,
Klopstock had there obtained a triumphant recep
tion; surrounded by nine youths and nine damsels,
— so many Muses, — he made sentimental excur
sions, in a boat bedecked with flowers, on an en
trancing lake, reading unpublished fragments of
his Messie to his enraptured admirers.

But especially it was the time when a breath of
liberty was disturbing men's minds. Control social

9

10 PESTALOZZI

and Emile were read with passion. Pestalozzi was
quite enraptured by them ; and even in his old age
he remained faithful to this youthful passion, since
he wrote in 1826 : " With Herculean might Rousseau
rent asunder the heavy chains which bound the
human mind; he restored the child to itself and
education to nature.77 When Geneva, imitating
the intolerance of the Parliament at Paris, in its
turn condemned and expelled Rousseau, Zurich
sided against Geneva. Encouraged by its profess
ors themselves, the university youth grouped itself
into societies for study and for political or social
reforms. Anonymous pamphlets appeared, ener
getically attacking the sheriffs, the bailiffs, and even
certain ministers of religion. Pestalozzi grew up
in this inflamed environment. Some years later,
he made a wicked bailiff the villain, in his romance
of Leonard et Gertrude. From his twentieth year,
however, he was already committed to the new ideas.
He was looked upon as a revolutionary. With a
few friends, the " patriots,77 as they were called, with
Lavater, among others, he caused himself to be
prosecuted for complicity in a pretended conspiracy
against the safety of the State. Whilst the govern
ment of Zurich banished one of these innocent con
spirators, guilty only of denouncing the embezzle
ments of Bailiff Grebel and Sheriff Brunner, and the

PESTALOZZI 11

evil conduct of Pastor Hottinger, others, and Pesta-
lozzi himself, were imprisoned, tried, and fined.

From these passionate struggles of his youth,
Pestalozzi imbibed, and even whilst imbibing dis
played, the democratic faith which animated him
throughout his life and made of him the indefatiga
ble supporter of the poor and suffering against the
abuses of the great. Other influences, however,
helped in the formation of his noble character.
Home surroundings, still more than social environ
ment, acted on his affections. At the age of six
he lost his father, a medical practitioner in Zurich.
He is peculiarly his mother's son. Rousseau was
badly brought up by a fantastic, careless father;
Pestalozzi was well brought up by a good, intelli
gent mother. This is partly responsible for the
diversity of their characters and destinies. Left
destitute with a daughter and two sons, the poor
widow devoted herself entirely to her children's
education. She was assisted by a wonderfully
devoted servant, faithful Babeli, who had promised
the dying father — and she kept her word — never
to forsake the family as long as she lived. In this
humble home, under this watchful, tender care, the
child learned early the virtues of simplicity and
frugality, which the conditions of an arduous life
imposed as a rigorous obligation on the man. There

12 PESTALOZZI

also he acquired an unalterable purity of sentiment.
Thence, moreover, with all these qualities, were per
chance derived some of the defects of his incom
plete mind, sensitive rather than meditative. He
often lacked practical sense. In 1765, his friend
Bluntschli, who died at the age of twenty-five, said
to him: " Never engage in an enterprise without
having at your side a man whose experience and cool
reason will guarantee you against the dangers to
which your goodness and trusting confidence will
expose you." Niederer, who was one of the collabo
rators of his old age, says that in him were to be
found the persevering will of a man and the
courage of a hero, united with the sensibility and
delicacy of a woman and the confiding simplicity
of a child.

Pestalozzi's studies were of the most serious kind.
He quickly renounced theology and the ecclesias
tical calling which had at first attracted him. The
cause of his retirement was doubtless the spirit of
liberty obtained from reading Rousseau, rather than
the alleged misadventure of an unsuccessful sermon;
it is indeed narrated that he stopped short after the
first words of his discourse. He turned to legal
studies, in order to acquire the knowledge neces
sary for a politician and social reformer, as he wished
to become. He read the ancient authors lovingly,

PESTALOZZI 13

and in his twentieth year produced a little work in
which he dealt with the legislation of Sparta.

It was not, however, classical reading or theoretical
revery alone which prepared him to become the
free citizen, the friend of humanity. The circum
stances of his life procured for him a premature ex
perience of social realities. He spent his holidays
in the country, either at Hongg, with his paternal
grandfather, Pastor Pestalozzi, or with his mother's
brother, Doctor Hotze, at Richtersweil. With them,
he visited the poor and the sick. He was brought
into contact with the sufferings of the people. He
heard the lamentations of the peasants. Pity en
tered his young heart and dwelt there ever after.
Since it is true that human personality is largely
the reflection of the surroundings in which it develops,
it must be taken into consideration that Pestalozzi
spent his youth amongst good people, that he grew
up in an atmosphere of uprightness; and he was
influenced by it during the whole of his life.

One day, whilst quite a youngster, having a little
pocket-money, he went into the shop of a neighbor,
a confectioner of Zurich, to buy some dainties.
The young lady who was serving, the shopkeeper's
own daughter, Anna Schulthess, whom Pestalozzi
was to marry some years later, understanding her
business interests none too well, as it would seem,

14 PESTALOZZI

dissuaded the child from satisfying his gluttony
and advised him to save his money for a more useful
purpose. One of the first lessons of wisdom by which
he profited was thus received from the person who
was for forty-six years, from 1769 till 1815, to share
his hopes and disappointments, to partake of his
too rare joys and the long succession of his sorrows.
Anna Schulthess herself, however, was not without
defects : she was somewhat coquettish ; and Pesta-
lozzi was perhaps present at the conversation which
she once had with Bluntschli, their mutual friend.
She asked him for his opinion on an elegant assort
ment of ribbons, with which she wished to adorn
herself. But Bluntschli answered her severely:
" Whilst your poor neighbour is in greater need of a
thaler to buy food than you are of this bauble, you
have a better use for your money."

The gentle, salutary influences of family life were
continued for Pestalozzi in the conjugal dwelling.
Pestalozzi's wife was worthy of him, and their
marriage was a union of souls. The letters which
they exchanged have been preserved, and never
did betrothed lovers correspond in such terms.
Far from displaying himself to the greatest advan
tage, Pestalozzi complacently detailed all his defects,
his absent-mindedness, his neglect of dress, his
unattractive exterior. His love declarations seem

PESTALOZZI 15

like a confession of his sins. He exhorted Anna to
reflect well before coming to a decision. He told
her that he lacked foresight greatly, that he had
no presence of mind, and felt others7 misfortunes to
the extent of being unhappy himself and losing
all peace of mind ; he warned her that he would be
first a citizen, then a husband; that she would
have to suffer, that it would be necessary to
know how to sacrifice family and interests, both
personal and selfish, to the superior interests of
humanity. In short, he traced out his life's pro
gramme. But Anna also had a noble heart.
She attached no importance to a badly tied
cravat, and although she let Pestalozzi under
stand that she was well aware that he was not exactly
beautiful, that nature would have been harsh to
him "if she had not given him large, dark eyes in
which she portrayed the goodness of his strong, serious
mind, "she did not hesitate: she plighted her troth,
in spite of her parents' opposition, in spite of the
tears of her mother, who said to her, — and she was not
mistaken: "You must resign yourself to privations;
you must be satisfied with bread and water ! . . ."

Married at the age of twenty-three, in 1769,
Pestalozzi was a father a year later; and if the
educator had been awakened by philanthropic
ideas, his paternal love finally determined his voca-

16 PESTALOZZI

tion. If he became a teacher, it is because humanity
was dear to him, and also because he tenderly cher
ished his only child. His first dream, which lasted
till his death, was to comfort and regenerate man
kind, especially the poor, by instruction and educa
tion. In his twentieth year, a journalist of original
ity, he wrote down in the foremost rank, amongst
the prayers which he formulated for the improve
ment of the people's condition, "that some one might
be willing to draw up in simple form some educational
principles within the reach of all." The father it was
who responded to this appeal, or at least, attempted to
do so, by jotting down, in the private Journal which
he wrote out in 1774, the results of his son Jaqueli's
education. This education was his first experi
ment in pedagogics. He brought to it no precon
ceived notions. Indeed, all his life he was nothing
but an experimentalist, seeking the truth in action,
in teaching, without a systematic mind or a plan
drawn up beforehand.

With Jaqueli, he observed, hesitated, groped : he
never ceased to grope. He hesitated between
the principles of authority and of liberty. In this
first attempt, however, were present the germs of
most of the ideas which dominated all his pedagogic^ :
to be in no hurry, to make clear but to the sig&t
and to the understanding, to develop the senses, to

PESTALOZZI 17

take nature as guide, to attach more importance to
things than to words, to respect the child's dawning
liberty. . . . " To know words which do not respond
to precise ideas is an immense barrier to the truth."
— " All instruction would not be worth a farthing if it
necessitated the loss of a child's courage and gayety."
He wrote later: "Laughter is a gift of God; let
children laugh ; encourage merriment in them."
Imitation of Rousseau is apparent: at the age of
eleven, Jaqueli, like Emile, could hardly read
and write.1 He exercised his senses more than
his memory and judgment. His education was
chiefly negative, obeying nature's necessities, and
not man's will. Pestalozzi's good sense, however,
showed him what was chimerical in Rousseau's
Utopias. Experience taught him that it is at times
necessary to oppose nature. He prescribed hours
of regular work for Jaqueli. He shut him up, when
four years old, to force him to study. He found
reasons for liberty and invoked other reasons for
obedience. In the same way, false to Rousseau's
principles in this also, he did not allow the child's

1 Jaqueli was sent to college, at Basle, in 1784. He did not
fulfil his father's hopes. Very sickly from childhood, he died
young, in 1800, leaving a son, Gottlieb, the consolation of his
grandfather's old age. Gottlieb, at first apprenticed as tanner's
workman, returned to Yverdon in 1817. There he married one
of Schmid's sisters.

18 PESTALOZZI

affectionate feelings to remain dormant, and he
strove to develop affection in Jaqueli before all else.
"I wish only to be a schoolmaster/' replied Pesta-
lozzi, twenty years later, to those of his friends who
had been brought into power by the Swiss Revolu
tion of 1798, when they offered him administrative
posts and lucrative appointments. His true voca
tion was that of schoolmaster, and all his life he
longed to teach, but very little of his time was so
employed. Circumstances and events, which so
often disturbed the long career in which we are about
to follow him, prevented him from fulfilling his wish.
He could not continue even the education of his
son, which he had begun with such delight, at least
not under the same conditions, in the isolation and
privacy of family life. In 1775, the school for in
digent children at Neuhof was opened ; and Pesta-
lozzi, who was going to give his entire affections to
the little unfortunates whom he had collected there,
did still more: he gave them for a comrade his
well-beloved son, Jaqueli, as though to show clearly
that he was a father to them all.

Ill

NEUHOF, Stans, Burgdorf, Yverdon, are the four
stages of Pestalozzi's pedagogical apostolate, we
may almost say the four stations of his Calvary;
for, in the dreary shadow of his existence, darkened
by so many clouds, the days of joy and peace were
but passing gleams of light. At Neuhof his mis
fortunes began.

Pestalozzi had left Zurich, in 1768, to settle in the
canton of Aargau, in the open country; he was
impelled by various reasons. In the first place, the
love of the country called to him. Like Rousseau,
he had become disgusted with towns, and he would
willingly have indorsed the saying, omne malum ex
urbe. In addition to this, he had to seek a profes
sion which would provide him with a livelihood.
He naively believed that he was destined to become
a farmer, and as a farmer he settled near Birr. After
a makeshift establishment, he built an unassuming
house, which he named Neuhof, "the new farm.7'
He established himself there, first with his mother,
then with his young wife. He arrived rich in hope

19

20 PESTALOZZI

and in illusion. He reckoned on making a fortune
by cultivating land which till then had been barren.
He had gone through a rapid technical apprentice
ship with Tschiffeli, an agriculturist in Berne can
ton. He had returned with the horny hands of a
field labourer and with a small stock of agronomic
ideas. Furnished with this newly acquired knowl
edge, he flattered himself that he would profitably
work his rural domain and gain his independence:
"I shall become independent of the whole world."
By new methods of cultivation, by planting madder
and starting gardening operations, he hoped to fer
tilize the few acres of poor ground which he had
bought at a cheap rate; just as he dreamed later of
transforming difficult child natures by applying his
personal methods of instruction.

It was not, however, care for his material interests
alone which sent Pestalozzi to live in the country.
The young patriot of Zurich had not bidden farewell
to his aspirations to become a reformer. If he went
to the country people, it was out of sympathy for
the wretchedness of the toilers of the fields. When
quite little, he had said, "When I am big, I shall
support the peasants." He wished now to keep
his word, to seek the means of curing poverty and
lightening the ignorance of the country people.
This secret thought of becoming an educator in the

PESTALOZZI 21

village is shown clearly by what he wrote to his
betrothed in 1768, to persuade her to follow him
and to leave Zurich. "We must," said he, "set
up our cottage home far from that centre of vice. . . .
When I am in the country, if I see a child with prom
ise of a beautiful mind, and in need of bread, I shall
take it by the hand and make a good citizen of it."
As Anna Schulthess, and especially her parents,
became uneasy concerning the fortune that such
an adventurous enterprise had in store for him,
he invoked the high moral incentives of the services
to be rendered to the poor and to humanity: "In
order to be of service to our fellow-citizens,
should we not restrict our personal needs? . . .
To give poor children the milk which I like I
shall joyfully content myself with drinking cold
water. . . ."

That is, moreover, what happened. Neuhof was
not for long a simple agricultural undertaking. In
spite of unremitting labour and prodigies of economy,
the defeat was complete at the end of a few years.
Bankruptcy was imminent. In vain generous
friends, who tired eventually, had advanced funds
to Pestalozzi. In vain his wife had made over the
greater part of her patrimony. He struggled; he
worked with his own hands; but all in vain. In
1775, the ruin was complete. The fields on which

22 PESTALOZZI

he had built up illusory hopes, from which he
expected extraordinary returns and profits, had
to be sold. The ownership of the house and a
few plots of land alone remained to him. And
for the first time the ill-starred great man had
to cry out: "The dream of my life has faded
away! . . ."

If, however, the agricultural enterprise of Neuhof
ended in financial disaster, it was the occasion of a
moral triumph. Ruined, having lost almost his all,
what did Pestalozzi do? He opened a refuge for
poor children. He himself was poor, to almost the
same degree as the unfortunate children whom he
harboured, fed, arid clothed, and whom he was at the
same time trying to instruct and educate. With
them he shared what little bread he had. Never
was the spirit of sacrifice carried so far. It
is in memory of this charitable effort that
Pestalozzi was able to say, "I myself have lived
like a beggar, that I might teach beggars to live
like men.'7

Success seemed at first to attend this bold stroke.
The refuge opened with a score of children. The
number increased as time went on, but never ex
ceeded a hundred. They were for the most part
little vagrants, whom "the angel of beneficence," as
Madame de Krudner called him, picked up at random

PESTALOZZI 23

and without selection, on the highways. Did they
not need his help and care so much the more as they
were more vicious and wretched? Boys or girls,
they varied in age from ten to twenty. Some were
natural children, without family. There were con
victs' sons among the number. They came to him
covered with rags and vermin. Never was less
promising matter offered to the efforts of an edu
cator. "They were/7 said he himself, " specimens
of the lowest stage of humanity."

Pestalozzi divided the time of these singular pupils
between manual labor and a few intellectual exer
cises, language lessons, moral and religious explana
tions: "They were not allowed to forget God, their
Father and Saviour;77 and this was almost their
entire mental training. During the greater part of
the day, the children were busy in the garden or
fields, or occupied in industrial work. For Pesta
lozzi, fertile in expedients, had joined to his farm
a cheese dairy and also spinning works. In the fine
season, work was done in the open air ; on bad days
and in winter, cotton was spun. Pestalozzi had en
listed the services of a certain number of workmen,
weavers or others. It was the application of one
of the main ideas of his pedagogics : the association
of handicraft with elementary education. A school
without a workshop, a school which is not at the same

24 PESTALOZZI

time an apprenticeship to a livelihood, seemed an
absurdity to him.1

Undoubtedly it is not to be supposed that dis
tinguished men could issue from the school at Neu-
hof, recruited as it was from such abnormal material.
One, however, is mentioned, the painter Gottfried,
celebrated under his cognomen of the "cat Raphael."
What could be done with pupils of whom Pestalozzi,
in an account published in 1778, gives us particulars
such as the following? " Barbara Brunner is seven
teen years old ; she came to us in a state of complete
ignorance and extreme wildness. . . ." Another
lass showed all the signs of an "unimaginable brut-
ishness." The boys were no better. Pestalozzi por
trays them for us, sly, distrustful, heedless, enfeebled
by privation, accustomed to idling. Nevertheless,
there is no doubt that the beneficent action of an
ardent and enthusiastic educator had an influence
for good on the character of some of these poor crea
tures, whom he strove to deliver from the evil instincts
of their nature and the depraved habits of their
childhood. Very careful not to train them in ad
vance of their future condition, he thought less about
their instruction than about their moral regeneration.

1 This is the idea which he set forth, at this period, in his Lettres
sur V education de la jeunesse pauvre des campagnes. Seyffarth's
edition, Vol. VIII.

PESTALOZZI 25

At the end of a few months, some, at least, of these
fallen beings were quite transformed. They entered
the refuge in an abject condition; they left it, if not
cured of all their moral blemishes, at least perceptibly
improved and capable of earning an honest living.
The pedagogic trial of Neuhof was, however, to fail,
as the agricultural undertaking had done. The estab
lishment passed through crises, followed by some re
turns of hope. In 1778, Pestalozzi wrote: " After a
time of privation surpassing anything that could be
imagined, my establishment is saved." Generous
benefactors, indeed, had come to his assistance. From
the beginning, in 1776, the philanthropist, Iselin, a
native of Bale, who was " a veritable father" to him,
had recommended this interesting attempt at regen
erating the masses ' ' to the friends of humanity." Some
subscriptions delayed the final ruin. Moreover, a large-
hearted woman, a humble servant, Elisabeth Naf,1

1 Elisabeth Naf married, in 1802, Mathias Krusi, the brother
of Pestalozzi's first collaborator. She it was who served for the
pattern of the ideal woman personified in Gertrude, of whom Pesta
lozzi said, likening her somewhat pompously to the sun : " Reader,
I should like to find you a perceptible representation of this woman,
so that her silent activity may be understood and admired. What
I am about to say is tremendous, but I venture to say it: thus
does God's sun journey from morn till eventide; . . . when it
sinks to rest, you know that it will rise once more on the morrow,
to reanimate the earth. . . . This great sun which is earth's
life-giver is the image of Gertrude and of every woman who makes
the family chamber into God's sanctuary. ..."

26 PESTALOZZI

had come to offer her services to Pestalozzi,
and to bring back a little order into a house left
somewhat neglected from^ sickness or the absences
of Madame Pestalozzi. Elisabeth Naf, like Babeli,
was the type of those daughters of the people
who, by an admirable instinct of devotion, are
attached for life to an unfortunate family. It is
of Elisabeth that Pestalozzi said: "I should turn
and be uneasy in my tomb, nor should I be happy
even in heaven, if I did not know that after my
death she will be more honoured than myself. . . .
Without her, I should long have ceased to exist."
But money difficulties multiplied. Always sub
ject to illusions, Pestalozzi had hoped that the pupils'
work would produce enough to cover the expenses of
their maintenance. He himself attended the mar
kets and fairs to sell his cotton stuffs and thread;
but the receipts were wholly insufficient. His pupils7
lack of discipline also caused him bitter disappoint
ment. Those who had relatives, worked upon by
covetous families, no sooner received their new
clothes from the generosity of the poorest of men,
than they ran away and appeared no more. Those
who were orphans were at times preferable. In the
school itself, Pestalozzi could not make himself
respected. The moment his back was turned, the
rascals made fun of him. His crops were ravaged

PESTALOZZI 27

by hail. Epidemic diseases, measles and scab,
raged amongst the children. Doctors were needed;
but how were they to be paid? Courage cannot
meet all needs. Never did Pestalozzi better appre
ciate the disproportion between what he desired and
what he could do. They suffered from cold, and at
times from hunger. In 1780, Pestalozzi had to give
up the impossible struggle, in which he had ex
hausted all his strength and all his resources.

IV

EIGHTEEN years passed by — years of material
poverty and moral discouragement for Pestalozzi,
from the day on which the last beggar child left
the refuge at Neuhof to that on which the first
orphan entered the refuge at Stans. A period of
waiting and inaction, during which "he ate away
his heart/7 as he said, " swallowed up in the mire of
his wretchedness/ ' living the life "of a plant trampled
at the roadside/' Pestalozzi spent these sad years
at Neuhof, in the humble dwelling which he had
retained. Neuhof, moreover, was always his chosen
abode. There his son had been born; there he had
reared him; thither he returned when his term of
life was coming to an end, weary and ill, to write
Destinees de ma vie, the Chant du Cygne, a kind
of autobiography, and then to die. From 1780 to
1798, he often knew dire privation. But he suffered
still more from the feeling of his powerlessness, from
the downfall of his hopes, and from the interruption
to his career of activity. He had not even the con
solation of his neighbours ' sympathy. The peasants,

28

PESTALOZZI 29

who have no great liking for unsuccessful enter
prises, looked on him as a poor madman.

At any rate, whilst waiting for the means of re
commencing his life of action, he worked with his
mind; he meditated and wrote. These eighteen
years were not lost. It was at this time that he
composed most of his works. In 1780, he published
the Soiree d'un ermite, a series of reflections pre
sented in the form of short aphorisms, having for
their main object the raising of the people by edu
cation; in 1781 appeared the first volume of Leonard
et Gertrude, the celebrated popular novel, which had
a brilliant success and which made him famous in
a day; the three last parts were issued in 1783, 1785,
and 1787 ; l but the public welcome was colder for
these. In 1782, Pestalozzi published Christophe
et Else, another novel, "the second book for the
people," which passed unnoticed, and which he had
designed as an educational manual for the use of
the actual school (Realschule), and of the universal
school. Lastly, in 1797, appeared the Fables, which
he had begun to write about 1782, and which, whilst
possessing a certain literary value, are especially
social in character; and a work which he considered

1 Among Pestalozzi's unpublished manuscripts have been found
two other supplementary parts of Leonard et Gertrude: the fifth,
in which he dealt with government, and the sixth, which is purely
pedagogical.

30 PESTALOZZI

the most important of his writings, the Recherches
sur la marche de la nature dans le developpement de
V esprit humain. This was an essay on general phi
losophy, in which, in spite of painstaking effort, the
inadequacy and weakness of his abstract thought are
left too much in evidence by the author. Beyond
all doubt, Pestalozzi had literary talent ; and Leonard
et Gertrude, besides the Fables, proves that by his
simple conceptions, his penetrating, intimate ob
servations, and, above all, by his feeling, he was
capable of distinguishing himself in works of popular
literature. But he was by no means equipped for
a work of philosophic generalization. The Recherches,
though they obtained Fichte's attention, were not
at all successful and scarcely deserved to be. Pesta
lozzi might have had more success if he had tried
dramatic literature, as at one time he thought of
doing : he might have inaugurated, a hundred years
in advance, the " Popular Plays."

Pestalozzi had become an author from necessity
still more than from liking. "I would have made
wigs," said he, mournfully, "to give bread to my
wife and child." But his writings, if they were his
livelihood, earned him besides a beginning of repu
tation and glory. The hermit of Neuhof, scoffed
at and ridiculed by his near neighbours, became a
personage afar off. The legislative Assembly con-

PESTALOZZI 31

ferred on him the title of French citizen by the de
cree of the 26th August, 1792, in which it was stated
that "men who, by their writings and their courage,
had served the cause of liberty and freedom of mind
could not be looked upon as foreigners in France/'
Pestalozzi's name was there written down in good
company, beside glorious names, such as Washing
ton, Kosciusko, Schiller, Klopstock, and a few others.

From Germany also came to him precious testi
mony of interest and sympathy. In the same year
which saw him proclaimed a French citizen, he was
favourably received, on making a journey to Leipzig,
by Goethe, Wieland, Klopstock, and Herder. In
the following year, he entered into relations with
Fichte, who was to remain his friend forever, and
who said of him: "He is ugly, he is dressed like a
peasant, but he is so full of feeling that few men can
compare with him."

The author's success did not make Pestalozzi
forget the fundamental aspiration of his life. He
still wished to be a teacher, but there was to be a
revolution ere he could resume the role, and then
only for a very short time, in the improvised or
phanage, which the new government of the Swiss
Confederation organized at Stans, in 1798.

In Pestalozzi's academic life, the Stans experi
ment appears to us to have been the heroic moment,

32 PESTALOZZI

the moment when he was most truly himself, and
when he showed most clearly all the treasures of
devotion and tenderness which his heart contained.
He was fifty-two years old. Already, as his friend
Stapfer, minister of arts and sciences, said, "he was
fighting against the approach of old age." And at
an age when some of our teachers already think
of taking their pension, he undertook the direction
of a school of children, aged from six to ten, under
most unfavourable conditions. There was, indeed,
nothing tempting in the task. It has been said,
and not without reason, that in choosing Pestalozzi,
the Swiss Directorate made a blunder. The up
bringing of orphans in a devastated country, laid
waste by the civil war, was to be undertaken, and
it was a representative of the victorious party, it
was a democrat and heretic, who was sent to the
vanquished people in their exasperation. Pesta
lozzi came to preach peace and humanity in a region,
the Nildwalden, where, on the very eve of his arrival,
the French army, joined to the Swiss army, had
waged a cruel war. Nearly four hundred men,
women, and children had been killed ; as many houses
had been burned; priests had been massacred at
the altars; Stans had been half destroyed by fire.
Moreover, it was a Protestant who was sent as
educator to a devout Catholic population, made

PESTALOZZI 33

fanatical by the preaching of the Capuchins, to make
trial of lay education in a transformed convent.

Pestalozzi knew what obstacles he would encoun
ter. Anybody else would have been afraid, but
he had no hesitation. He had so long been pining
away "in rage and despair" at his inaction. He
issued from a species of moral death throe. The
mission offered him at Stans was for him a resurrec
tion. He was at last to be able to apply the ideas
which he had set forth in Leonard et Gertrude.
"I am effacing the shame of my life," said he, in a
triumphant shout. ... "I feel myself become a
man again." He perceived no better possible em
ployment for his activity than to struggle against
stupidity, coarseness, ignorance, and vice. The gov
ernment had thought of intrusting him with the
control of a normal school. He preferred to go to the
infants, feeling strongly that elementary education
was his true vocation. "To realize my life's dream
I would have agreed to go and make my attempt on
the highest summits of the Alps, without fire or
water. . . ."

There have been Swiss historians who have blamed
Pestalozzi for taking part in the work of the Swiss
Revolution, and treating with the French army
which fought for it. We know of nothing, on the
contrary, which does more honour to Pestalozzi

34 PESTALOZZI

than his having resolutely joined with those of his
compatriots who were friends of progress, and conse
quently having sided with France and the Revolu
tion. At this period he was at heart a Frenchman.
It was not without a measure of patriotic pride
that we saw, in the Pestalozzianum at Zurich, one
of his manuscripts, an Appel aux habitants des bords
du Lac, signed: "Pestalozzi, citizen of Zurich and
citizen of France." So long as the Revolution aimed
only at serving the cause of emancipation of the peo
ple, Pestalozzi remained faithful to it. In the
Helvetisches Volkblatt, a newspaper in which he
wrote before settling at Stans, he addressed eloquent
discourses to his fellow-citizens, at the time when
France asked Switzerland to furnish her with a
contingent of eighteen thousand armed auxiliaries:
"0 my native land, rejoice! France, the great na
tion, takes thee by the hand in a passion of brotherly
love. ... It is no small honour to go and learn the
profession of arms beside the legions of Bonaparte,
Jourdan, and Moreau, and to train yourselves for
the service of your fatherland in the heroic army
of the French. . . ." It was not till later that
Pestalozzi's affections turned from France when he
saw its generous aspirations followed by the bloody
dashes across Europe and the ambitious follies of
Napoleon's despotism.

PESTALOZZI 35

The material settlement at Stans was of the most
miserable kind. Pestalozzi was assisted only by
a charwoman: "I myself was governor, accountant,
man-servant, and almost maid-servant, in a wreck
of a house." The workmen were engaged in putting
the refuge to rights, with the orphans already in
possession. Pestalozzi had to attend to a thousand
material cares, to busy himself with the food and
clothing of all this little company of eighty children,
of whom the majority were confined in the school.
He slept in their midst; he cared for and nursed
them with a mother's tenderness. He surrounded
them with his love : "It was necessary," said he, that
from morn till night, these poor forsaken ones should
feel that my heart was with them, and that their
happiness was mine." By the constant influence
of his presence and the radiance of his sympathy
he took possession of these little souls. "I laughed
and cried with them. . . ." With them he was ill,
in a refuge which was less a school than a children's
hospital: "We all coughed," said he, "within the
damp walls of a newly reconstructed house, and in
a particularly severe winter."

In a long, affecting letter addressed to his Zurich
friend, the bookseller Gessner, son of the author
of Idylles, Pestalozzi recounted the means which he
employed to begin the intellectual and moral edu-

36 PESTALOZZI

cation of his pupils at Stans. One word sums them
up : action. He acted unceasingly. He spoke ; he
taxed himself unreservedly. In class, he went from
pupil to pupil, encouraging the hard-working and
rebuking the idle. An extraordinary animation,
a sustained attention on the part of the pupils, re
warded the master's efforts. "They had the desire,
they found the power," said he; "they persevered;
they were joyous. They felt dormant and unknown
forces awakening within them." The tedium which
too often accompanies study had disappeared like
a shadow from the school. Those who visited
Pestalozzi at Stans bear most favourable testimony
to the progress which had been accomplished in a
few weeks: "One cannot believe one's eyes/7 wrote
Vicar Businger. "When I entered the class room,"
said Zschokke, the publicist, in his turn, "the chil
dren were so engrossed in their work that they hardly
lifted their heads." Some were learning letters and
figures ; some were calculating, others were drawing.
The only master for rather a large number of pupils,
Pestalozzi called on the more advanced to guide
the weaker ones. They were, added Zschokke,
grouped in threes; the eldest, placed in the middle,
put his arms around his little comrades' necks, the
better to conduct their work. It was a beginning
of mutual instruction. Intellectual exercises, as at

PESTALOZZI 37

Neuhof, alternated with manual labour. In short,
the results came up to Pestalozzi's expectations.
"I was convinced/' said he, "that my heart would
correct and change the character of my children
by the time the spring sun came and revived the
earth benumbed by winter. And, indeed, before
the spring had melted the snow on our mountains,
my pupils were no longer recognizable. In their
angels' eyes and their transparent glances, I saw
the progress of their souls. . . ." What Pestalozzi
said of the Pere Girard can be applied to himself:
"The Pere Girard works miracles; with mud he
makes gold."

The course of events abruptly interrupted Pesta-
lozzi's courageous trial. The exigencies of the war,
which had begun again, required that the orphans7
refuge should become a military hospital. The
little mountain dwellers had to make room for sick
and wounded soldiers. The experiment had lasted
less than six months, from the 14th of January, 1799,
to the 8th of June in the same year. Assuredly
one could not think of suggesting it as a model for
imitation, any more than it would be possible to
make general the ideal education invented by Rous
seau for his Emile. The " Stans folly," as it has been
called, though it was a reality, should only be con
sidered as a hazardous enterprise upon which none

38 PESTALOZZI

but an exceptional man may venture. Where find
another Peotalozzi, animated with the same fer
vour? He himself could not have long continued
such an effort. Whilst the little flock prospered, the
shepherd, indeed, was becoming exhausted. He had
reached the end of his strength and was spitting
blood. He left for the mountains, for the heights
of Gurnigel, grieved to see his work interrupted,
determined to take it up again, when he was able,
on the first opportunity, but under the necessity
of restoring his strength and health, in the complete
repose and salubrious air of the high mountains.
It was from the height of Gurnigel that he said,
whilst contemplating the vast perspectives and
beautiful scenery of the valleys of Switzerland,
stretching away into the distance in front of him:
"I admire the beauty of the landscape, but I think
chiefly of the poor people who dwell in these pictu
resque valleys, of those who suffer there from bad
instruction, ignorance, and misery!"

Roger de Guimps, who was one of the best stu
dents and most observant biographers of Pestalozzi,
wrote, after he had journeyed, about 1870, through
the Aargau countryside, and had made a pilgrimage
to Neuhof: "We saw no poverty-stricken people;
everywhere a hard-working and prosperous popula
tion, well- cultivated lands, and good schools. . . .

PESTALOZZI 39

If Pestalozzi did not succeed in his practical attempts
at improving the people of these parts, the prin
ciples which inspired his enterprise have ended by
bearing their fruit." The same reflections came to
us when, a few months ago, we were about to visit
Stans for the purpose of there evoking the memory
of Pestalozzi's passage. In this retired corner of
Switzerland, where, a hundred years ago, he found
the ruins of the civil war and awakened hatreds,
where he was ill-received by a hostile populace, -
he who, as does happen, brought liberty in the guise
of oppression, — he is to-day forgotten. But all
is gay and smiling in the pretty little town of Stans,
situated a few miles from the beautiful Lake Lucerne.
The inhabitants seem happy, cured of all hatred,
and quieted in republican liberty. All around the
little town stretch cultivated fields and rich pas
tures, strewn with enormous apple trees and vener
able pear trees, which perchance Pestalozzi saw
planted, and which are loaded with abundant fruit
each year. From the height of the terrace of the
Stanserhorn, which, from its altitude of 6300 feet,
dominates the plain of Stans lying at its feet, whilst
looking at this pretty white village in its setting of
verdure, I said to myself that, despite appearances,
men such as Pestalozzi do not pass useless through
the world; that human thought also bears its fruit,

40 PESTALOZZI

since, by the continuation of its effort and with the
help of time, it succeeds in bringing about the reign
of peace, comfort, and happiness, where before was
only fanaticism, war, and misery ; and that if Pesta-
lozzi is forgotten at Stans, at least the dreams which
he conceived for the happiness of humanity are in
part realized in this corner of the universe as else
where.

IT was at Burgdorf, the second town in the can
ton of Berne, that teacher Pestalozzi was called again
to active service, some months after the closing of
the orphanage at Stans. And to speak the truth,
this was the only time that he was truly a teacher
in the proper sense of the word, in a regular school,
and had a class : a small class, however, of children
of both sexes not yet able to read. He found that
he was at the same time, as he said, "the most subor
dinate of masters, and the reformer of education."
And for a year he occupied himself, a humble assist
ant master, "in pushing the modest wheelbarrow
of the A B C."

I do not know whether the assistant teacher of
the infants' class at Burgdorf, if visited by a present-
day inspector, would have obtained from him a
good " Inspection report." I fear that he would
have been unfavourably commented on in more than
one respect : thus he liberally bestowed boxes on the
ear, in his movements of impatience ; he spoke very
quickly and shouted at the top of his voice ; he gave

41

42 PESTALOZZI

scarcely any explanations to his pupils, and con
fined himself to making them mechanically repeat
letters, then syllables and words. He did not fol
low a regular time-table. But, on the other hand,
how can we refrain from admiring the devotion and
zeal of the " celebrated old man," as the official
reports styled him already, who, still young under
his gray hair, strove to teach the alphabet to chil
dren of from five to eight years old ? The inspectors
of that time, the members of the Berne scholastic
commission, who visited the school in July, 1800,
after only eight months' work, had nothing but
praise for him: "Your pupils," they said, "have
made astonishing progress ; the cleverest are already
distinguishing themselves in penmanship, drawing,
and calculation. . . . You have shown what powers
are present in the youngest children, and the means
by which these powers can and should be developed."
After such a favourable inspection, Pestalozzi
really deserved promotion, and he obtained it.
From the infants' class, in which he was only as
sistant, he went as superintendent to the "second
boys' school" ; the first was in the hands of a teacher
who at the same time carried on the trade of shoe
maker, and had not been willing to authorize Pesta
lozzi to conduct his experiments with him. Burg-
dorf castle was assigned to the new establishment.

PESTALOZZI 43

Almost at once, however, the primary school was
transformed into the "Burgdorf Educational In
stitute," a composite, mixed establishment, half
school, half college, of which Pestalozzi took con
trol, obtaining the cooperation of his first collabo
rators, Krusi, Buss, and Tobler.1

Hardly had it begun, when the longed-for teacher's
career was already ended for Pestalozzi. Hence
forth he was something quite different from what
he wished to be : he was the head of an institution,
the superintendent of a great establishment for

1 Hermann Krusi, born in 1775, at Gais, in the canton of
Appenzell, was twenty-five years of age when he came to Burg-
dorf with a certain number of Appenzell children, and opened
a school there. Pestalozzi obtained his cooperation in 1800, and
thenceforward Krusi continued his collaboration. We tell else
where how he became a teacher. He left the Yverdon institute
some time before that establishment was closed; and, after Pesta-
lozzi's death, he became superintendent, first of a cantonal school
at Trogen, and later of a normal school at Gais. At Burgdorf
and Yverdon he was principally intrusted with the language
exercises and with natural history. Roger de Guimps pays tribute
to his moral qualities. He died in 1844. — Buss was a native of
Wiirttemberg. It was Tobler who brought him to Pestalozzi, as
a specialist in drawing and singing. — Tobler went to Burgdorf
some months later than Buss. He was born in Appenzell in 1769.
He died in 1843. He was directing a poor children's school at
Bale, when his friend Krusi sent there for him in 1800 and per
suaded him to rejoin Pestalozzi. He taught geography chiefly.
He left Yverdon long before the dissolution of the college, and, in
1810, he had already founded an industrial school at Mulhouse.
He afterwards directed other establishments.

44 PESTALOZZI

secondary education, or at the very least for higher
elementary education; he had a boarding-school
to govern, big boys to instruct, and quite a body of
professors to direct. What cares and difficulties
awaited him in functions for which he knew quite
well that he was unsuited! More than once he
thought of resigning, of becoming a teacher once
again, and of leaving what he called his " galley-
slave's bench." In spite of all, for twenty-five years
he devoted himself obstinately to his task, with
varying fortunes, and valiantly bore "a burden
which overwhelmed him." He resided at Burgdorf
until the 1st of July, 1804 ; in 1804, for a few months
at Miinchenbuchsee, in the neighbourhood of Hofwyl,
where Fellenberg,1 his intermittent friend, continued
his philanthropic attempts; lastly, at Yverdon, in
the canton of Vaud, from the 1st of July, 1805,
till 1825. "What a pity/7 wrote the Pere Girard
in his celebrated Rapport on the institution at Yver
don, "that Pestalozzi has been taken away from

1 Fellenberg (Emmanuel de), born in 1771, died in 1844, played
a great part in the history of Swiss education. He is the pedagogue
venerated in Berne, as is the Pere Girard in Fribourg, and Pesta
lozzi in Zurich and the whole of Switzerland. His aim was analo
gous to that of Pestalozzi, whose methods he rated highly in spite
of the very lively disagreements which he had with him. Like
Pestalozzi, in his Institut agricole, in his Institut des pauvres, etc.,
he wished to base the people's education on the combination of
manual labour with instruction.

PESTALOZZI 45

the career which he chose with such affection.
The primary school, the model of all the others, was
then nothing but a vision in his restless and labori
ous life ! . . ."

This was just what Pestalozzi himself felt : " What
I desired was not the possession of an establishment,
it was the consummation of my method." And,
in fact, as far as his administrative cares permitted,
he did not cease to pursue in his institutions this
intangible " Method" which he had outlined in his
books and made trial of in the refuges, the orphanages
and the schools, without having as yet succeeded in
defining it. At times he fancied that it should not
be restricted to childhood, that it could be extended
and applied to the more advanced studies of his new
pupils. He intrusted to his collaborators the care
of its elucidation, by preparing practical books, in
conformity with its principles. In 1803, Krusi and
Buss drew up Exercices intuitifs sur les nombres and
Exerdces intuitifs sur les formes et les grandeurs. On
his part Pestalozzi had written, as early as 1801, an
Instruction pour apprendre a lire et a epeler, and par
ticularly the most important of his pedagogic works,
Comment Gertrude instruit ses enfants.

The success of the institution at Burgdorf added
to the reputation which Pestalozzi had already
made. This educational establishment, we read in

46 PESTALOZZI

an official document, was the object of an extraor
dinary infatuation. It was eulogized by legions of
people. The number of pupils did not, however,
exceed a hundred. Amongst them was Ramsauer,
of Appenzell, who recounted humorously, and not
without malice, his old school-boy memories.1

About the year 1803, fresh collaborators gathered
round the master : the Alsatian Neef ;2 Barraud from
Vaud, whom, some years later, Pestalozzi had to
send to France, at the request of Maine de Biran;
Pfeiffer the musician ; Muralt the theologian,3 who
just missed being the teacher of Madame de Stae'Ps
children; Pastor Niederer,4 a lettered theologian,

1 See Ramsauer's work: Kurze Skisse meines padagogischen
Lebens. 1838.

2 Neef was chiefly occupied with the education of the deaf and
dumb. He went to Paris in 1803, and taught there for a time;
then he went to the United States and settled there.

3 Muralt, born at Zurich in 1780, was Pestalozzi's collaborator
from 1803 until 1810.

4 Niederer, like Krusi a native of Appenzell, had from afar
conceived an admiration for Pestalozzi. He went to Burgdorf, in
1803, to superintend the religious instruction there. In 1814,
he married Rosette Kasthofer, the teacher, who, since 1808, had
been superintending the girls' institution attached to the boys'
institution. Pestalozzi called him "the first of his sons," but he
had great cause to complain of him, and finished by giving the
preference to Schmid. In the last years of Pestalozzi's life,
Niederer, having become estranged from him, founded at Yver-
don an institution for girls, which prospered and which he trans
ferred to Geneva in 1837. He died in 1843.

PESTALOZZI 47

who scarcely left Pestalozzi again, and lastly Schmid,
first and foremost a mathematician.1 The scope of
the teaching was enlarged, thanks to these numerous
special collaborations. All subjects were studied:
chemistry, algebra, and also the dead languages.
Pestalozzi himself tried to draw up Latin exercises.
But the pupils became noted principally for their
dexterity in drawing and in mental arithmetic;
and in this the influence of the " Method" declared
itself. The discipline, moreover, was liberal and
gentle: "It is not a school but a great family that
I see," exclaimed a visitor. — "Of all petty tyrants,"
said Pestalozzi, "the worst are school tyrants;"
and he wanted no tyrants, either small or great.

It was not of his own free will that Pestalozzi,
in 1804, gave up his first institution, in the full tide
of prosperity. Political happenings, however, dis
possessed him of Burgdorf castle, which once more
became what it was before, the seat of the public
authorities for the district. This is still its function
at the present day. We recently visited Pesta-
lozzi's old residence. It is reached by a difficult

1 Joseph Schmid, the chosen of Pestalozzi, was born in 1786 in
the Tyrol. Having entered Burgdorf as a pupil in 1801, at six
teen years of age, he made such rapid progress that, two years
later, he was capable of teaching arithmetic. "I had," said he,
"found in Pestalozzi a second father." After the master's death,
he settled in Paris, where he died in 1851. Schmid was a Catholic.

48 PESTALOZZI

path which follows steep slopes, and it is situated
at the highest-lying part of the pretty industrial
town, which is proud of its Technikum, a school for
engineers, electricians, and architects. One cannot
help thinking, whilst ascending the hard-paved
road, of all the people of inquiring mind who were
attracted to it a century ago by Pestalozzi 's grow
ing fame. . Herbart, the favourite at the present day
of Swiss, German, and American pedagogues, visited
it; and after him a large number of German and
Danish educators, who came to make themselves
familiar with the processes of the Pestalozzian method,
the majority returning captivated and convinced, to
spread it in their respective countries. Those times
are distant. I entered the inner courtyard of the
castle, lonely and silent. On a wall a medallion of
Pestalozzi may be seen, and beside it there is an
inscription in German to inform us that this is a
token of gratitude, dedicated to his memory, in
1888, by the town of Burgdorf. Another inscription
calls to mind that Pestalozzi uttered " these divine
words": "Love your brothers, be not in love with
yourself, " and that they are taken from the book
which he composed in this very place, Comment
Gertrude, etc. This is all that remains of Pestalozzi
in Burgdorf. From the inner courtyard of the castle
a superb panorama is visible : the green, industrial

PESTALOZZI 49

valley of the Emmenthal; nearer at hand, thick
forests, escarpments, and rocks; nearer still, the
lower town, in which Pestalozzi was a teacher. The
castle itself gives an impression of profound melan
choly. I look closely, and see barred windows:
I even seem to hear smothered groans. This is
because the old castle is a prison. By a curious irony
of fate, the school from which in former times came
words of confidence in human dignity, eloquent ap
peals for nobility of conscience and for liberty of
existence, is now a place of detention for wrong-doers.
At the precise moment that I cross the threshold
on leaving, I pass a constable who is escorting a
prisoner, a vagabond of twenty years of age. The
unhappy man is going to be isolated in a cell. Pes
talozzi, in the simplicity of his candid soul, would
have received him very differently, with words of
encouragement ; he would doubtless have wished to
attempt to regenerate him also by instruction. . . .
Indeed, was it not thus, or nearly so, that one day
he addressed a criminal who was about to be con
fined in a prison cell? In a friendly way he took
his hand, slipped a coin into it, and said to him:
"If you had received a good education, you would
now be an honest man and a useful citizen. It
would not be necessary to chain you up like a
dog »

50 PESTALOZZI

It was at Yverdon, even more than at Burgdorf,
that Pestalozzi knew the delights of glory. There
he had moments of real celebrity. Pupils flocked
from all countries, from England, Italy, Spain, and
France as much as from Switzerland and Germany.
Some were refused from lack of space. Yverdon
became a cosmopolitan college, and the times were
heavy with ambition. "We were told that the eyes
of the world were fixed on us," narrates a pupil.
Visitors were so numerous as to interfere with the
order and the regularity of study. In the eyes of
foreigners Yverdon Institute was, as it were, one
of the curiosities of Switzerland. People visited
Pestalozzi as they made an excursion to a noted
peak or a glacier, or as they go at the present day
to Interlaken or Zermatt to admire the forces of
nature. Pestalozzi lent himself complaisantly to
these exhibitions, in which he saw a means of propa
gating his theories. When a visitor of note was
announced, he at once sent for one of his best collab
orators: "Take your best pupils," said he to him,
"and show what they know best." They applied
themselves to displaying the institute in the most
favourable light. The most sincere of men succumb
at times to the temptation of a certain charlatanism.
Their excuse is that they are seeking the triumph
of their ideas. "A prince is coming to see us,"

PESTALOZZI 51

said Pestalozzi; "he is the master of a great number
of serfs ; when we have convinced him he will have
them educated."

But Pestalozzi did not content himself with the
propaganda carried on for him by his visitors:
Madame de Stael, Froebel, Maine de Biran, the queen
of Wurttemberg, to mention only the most illustrious.
He did not shrink from any exertion to evangelize
the world. Thus, in 1802, with an official mission,
moreover, as a member of the Consulta helvetique,
he journeyed to Paris, nursing the secret hope of
gaining Bonaparte himself to his cause. "Switzer
land is too small," said he, "for what I would wish
to be. My ideas are cosmopolitan." But his recep
tion at Paris was not of a nature to encourage him.
"I have no time to occupy myself with questions of
ABC," declared the First Consul, plainly. And
Talleyrand, who a little later was present at a prac
tical exhibition of the Pestalozzian method, in the
class held by Neef, decided disdainfully: "It is too
much for the people !" Monge also, the founder of
the Polytechnic School, had said, "It is too much
for us !" Do not let us be astonished, after this, at
the severity of the opinion which Pestalozzi pro
nounced concerning France: "French children could
be made into the finest men in the world, if they
were brought up by German hands. French women

52 PESTALOZZI

are good, but the men are worth nothing! . . ."
Let us find consolation in thinking that Pestalozzi
had judged us somewhat hastily, as he only stayed
a few weeks in Paris.

Pestalozzi always looked for powerful protectors.
He was well aware that the individual action of
a few enthusiastic dreamers, such as himself, is far
from being sufficient to secure the success of the
most necessary reforms, that the support of govern
ments and the cooperation of legislators is essential.
"I am looking for a minister who is a man," he
exclaimed. He thought that he had found him,
in 1808, when his friend Nicolovius, having become
a State Councillor and one of the directors of public
education in Prussia, informed him of the schemes
for reform which the king befriended : "My dream/'
cried he, " shows me in Frederick- William the hero
of love as opposed to the heroes of war !" He hung
on, if I may use the expression, to all the sovereigns
who passed near him. In 1814, when Czar Alex
ander the First came to Bale, Pestalozzi hastened
to visit him. Without hesitation, he asked of him
the emancipation of the serfs and the reform of the
schools in Russia. What he obtained from him
was a cross, the Saint- Vladimir decoration of the
fourth class. In the same year, Frederick- William
the First, king of Prussia, passed through Neuchatel.

PESTALOZZI 53

Pestalozzi, though sick and feeble, asked audience
of him. To his friends who wished to dissuade him,
he replied: "I must see him, though it kill me!
Should my visit result only in obtaining a better
education for a single child, I shall be amply rewarded
for my trouble. . . ."

But it was especially in the organization of the
studies in a college of which he was the soul, that
Pestalozzi displayed all the efforts of his activity.
The programme of a school day at Yverdon was
nearly as follows: The pupils left their beds
at six o'clock. Pestalozzi, however, was awake
before them, and he was known to summon
the masters to his bedside as early as two o'clock
in the morning, to give them his instructions.
Having got up, the collegians went into the
courtyard, and there, in the open air, washed
in cold water spurting out of a long pipe,
pierced with holes, which brought the water
from a neighbouring well. Pestalozzi began the
day with a religious or moral lecture, in presence
of the professors and the assembled pupils: it was
the happy custom which in our times Felix Pecant
has so brilliantly reestablished in the Normal School
at Fontenay-aux-Roses. None of the lessons lasted
longer than an hour. They were varied by recrea
tion and walks on the neighbouring mountains.

54 PESTALOZZI

Manual labour, working in pasteboard and garden
ing, alternated with study. Each pupil had a small
plot of ground to cultivate. Physical training, of
which Pestalozzi hardly ever speaks, was not neg
lected.1 Some exercises in gymnastics were gone
through. In the evening, from seven o'clock till
eight, was the time for free intellectual work: the
pupils worked for themselves, wrote letters, or
practised drawing. Singing played an important
part : they sang all the time and everywhere, in the
intervals between lessons, at play, and out walking.
The masters mixed with the pupils during their
games, and played with them. There were neither
punishments nor rewards. Pestalozzi did not wish
for either rivalry or fear. The professors went to
report three times a week. Pestalozzi frequently
received the children in groups of five or six. At
times he stopped them in the corridors, and said to
them, "And you, too, don't you want to be good
and well-behaved?" He admitted no discipline
other than that of duty, or rather of affection and
love. He was not a master to his pupils: he
was "Father Pestalozzi/' and they all were his
children.

1 See the twentieth letter to Greaves, in which Pestalozzi recom
mends gymnastics, especially from the point of view of their moral
utility.

PESTALOZZI 55

Such a regimen very nearly approximated to that
which the reformers of our time are endeavouring
to introduce into some new foundations, such as the
"College of Normandy," or the "Des Roches School."
It was at that time a great novelty, and there is no
occasion for surprise at the success with which it
met. Side by side with brilliant pages, however,
the story of Yverdon contains many painful recitals.
There Pestalozzi was in turn the most celebrated
and acclaimed of educators, and the most decried
and vilified of men. A series of intrigues were
carried on around him. Wretched quarrels divided
the collaborators, whose cooperation he had been
obliged to obtain for special subjects, owing to the
mediocrity of his own learning. Undoubtedly he
had had the good fortune, thanks to the attraction
which he exercised over the minds of men, to obtain
the help of a great number of active, intelligent
young men. But unfortunately nearly all the most
distinguished and learned of these professors had very
bad dispositions: egotistical and absolute in their
opinions, if they possessed the knowledge which Pes
talozzi lacked, they were wanting in kindliness, which
constituted his power. How was it possible to suc
ceed in conciliating and keeping united masters who,
to begin with, differed in nationality and in racial
characteristics, — there were, at Yverdon, Germans,

56 PESTALOZZI

Frenchmen, and Italians, — and who also differed
in their aims? How was it possible, for example,
to make the idealistic theologian Niederer work in
harmony with the realistic mathematician Schmid?
To succeed in this would have required the energetic
control of an administrator like Fellenberg, whom
Pestalozzi called "the man of iron," a tact and
skill which, being entirely without it, he did not
employ.

Hence a series of internal dissensions, quarrels
followed by reconciliations, departures and returns.
There was a perpetual coming and going of profess
ors who could not manage to agree, and who, after
abusing each other, abused the master himself.
The conflict was incessant. Pestalozzi was con
tinually obliged to intervene in order to restore
peace, a precarious and temporary peace at that.
He addressed pathetic speeches, interrupted by sobs,
to his collaborators. He asked pity for himself:
"I entreat Mr. and Mrs. Niederer," wrote he, "to
spare me the martyrdom which I have suffered
for six years." At times, worn out, his patience at
an end, he escaped from this "hell," and took
refuge alone in the mountains, at Bullet, where
he composed verses of melancholy resignation:
"In days of tempest, God strengthened me, . . .
etc."

PESTALOZZI 57

He was, in addition, attacked from without.1
In every time and country, fanatics have been found
to decry innovators. He was accused of counte
nancing anti-Christian doctrines. Did he not dare
to write that "man can do all things, that his will
is enough, and that he should rely on himself alone " ?
Those of his colleagues who had remained ortho
dox Protestants were the first to cast stones at
him.2

Yet he was religious; he had a pious mind: "I
recognize the hand of God/7 he said, whenever any
thing auspicious happened to him. But he was not
forgiven for contenting himself with natural religion,
with a philosophic deism such as Rousseau professed,
and with a rational Christianity. "The mystery

1 Among his most violent detractors must be mentioned an
Englishman, Biber, who had been employed for some time in the
institute. He published, in 1827, a veritable pamphlet against
Pestalozzi, an " impious book/' said M. Guillaume, in which Pes-
talozzi was described as a " charlatan " and a " hypocrite " :
Beitrag zur Biographie Pestalozzis. In addition to this German
work, Biber published, in 1831, a book entitled : H. Pestalozzi and
Ms plan of Education, which we would not have mentioned, if we
had not recently learned from Mr. Herbert Spencer himself, — who
nevertheless most accurately appreciated the strength and the
weakness of the Pestalozzian method, — that it was through this
book alone that he knew Pestalozzi.

2 Several books have been written in Germany on Pestalozzi's
religious ideas. See Burkart, H. Pestalozzi etait-il un incredule?
Leipzic, 1841 ; — Heer, Sur la methode de Pestalozzi consideree comme
lefordement d'une education chretienne. Zurich, 1870.

58 PESTALOZZI

of the Trinity/' he said, "is not in the Bible, —
Jesus is simply the greatest of men."

Pestalozzi's sensitive soul suffered cruelly from
all these troubles. In vain did he cry out: "I am
master in my own house." The poor man, in propor
tion as he aged, grew weaker and more irritable, and
became more and more the plaything and dupe of
his associates. In 1820, he could still delude himself ;
he exclaimed: "I feel happy now. . . . Praise be
to God ! All goes well. The evening of my life is
peaceful and serene. . . ." This did not last.
The decay of the institution began about 1824,
and became ever more rapid. The pupils lessened
in number. His most faithful friends deserted him.
Jealous of Schmid, who, from 1815, reigned as master,
Niederer and Krusi established, in Yverdon itself,
rival schools in which they claimed to inherit the
Pestalozzian spirit, which, according to them, was
with Pestalozzi no longer. In addition to this
the State Council of the canton of Vaud demanded
the dismissal of Schmid, from whom Pestalozzi did
not wish to be separated. At last, wearied and
discouraged, the good old man resigned himself to
a fresh renunciation, and left Yverdon for good
on the 2d of March, 1826. "It was," said he, "as
though I were putting an end to my life, so much
did this separation pain me !"

PESTALOZZI 59

He had lived there for twenty years. And,
whatever he himself may have thought, it was there
that he reached the height of his glory. "My in
stitute, as born from the womb of chaos at Burgdorf,
as it existed at Yverdon in a deformity for which
no words serve, was not my life's ambition." He
continued to dream of a humble village school, with
the infants.1 It is none the less true that the ad
ministration of the college at Yverdon remains, in
the eyes of an equitable posterity, one of the chief
claims which Pestalozzi's pedagogic activity has
to distinction.

It was at Yverdon that Switzerland raised, in
1888, the finest of the monuments which she has
dedicated to him. We recently made our reverence
to this statue, which is the ornament of Pestalozzi
Place, quite near to the old castle where he used up
his declining years in the service of education. He
is represented standing, energetic and gentle, with
a well-tied cravat, such as he never wore : for, as
is known, nothing was more neglected than his dress.

1 The best proof that can be given of the interest which Pesta
lozzi did not cease to take in primary education is the creation of
the normal school, organized by him, in 1818, at Clindy, a suburb
of Yverdon. This institution, which was to be paid for from the
Cotta subscription money, took in twelve poor children, boys and
girls, who were prepared there for the profession of teaching; it
is deserving of a special study.

60 PESTALOZZI

Near him, two children, a girl and a boy, are listen
ing to him. He is pointing out to them the way
to the school, Yverdon castle, which remains the
seat of the primary schools of the town, with their
twenty-two classes and their thousand pupils. The
secondary education is conducted on other premises,
in a college which is a veritable palace and bears on
its fagade, written in large letters, the names of
Pestalozzi and some of his pupils, Roger de Guimps,
Vuillemin, etc. Rousseau's name might also have
been written there.

We like to couple Pestalozzi with Rousseau, for
we see in them two heroes of modern education.
Brothers in origin, the citizen of Geneva and the
citizen of Zurich are also brothers in feeling and in
their aspirations towards better education. But
at Yverdon the comparison is singularly striking.
It was in fact to Yverdon, in that delightful country
whose beauty he has so highly praised, that Rous
seau, in 1762, forty years before Pestalozzi arrived
there, sadly came to live through the first days of
his exile, after the condemnation of Emile by the
Parliament of Paris. It was of Yverdon that he
wrote: "I am going to wander among these moun
tains, until I find a refuge wild enough for me to
spend there in peace the remainder of my wretched
days." It was from Yverdon, where he had thought

PESTALOZZI 61

to set foot in "a land of justice and liberty," that he
was expelled, some weeks later, by the retrograde
government of Berne, and was compelled to go for
hospitality to the king of Prussia. And it was to
Yverdon that the government, transformed by the
revolution of 1798, summoned Pestalozzi to continue,
in practical form, Rousseau's theoretical work.
So that, in the space of half a century, the same town
sheltered them both ; it witnessed the passage of the
unhappy outlaw, embittered and irritated by per
secution, and then it welcomed Rousseau's disciple,
full of ardour and courage, who also was working for
the education of humanity.

Sad and poor, Pestalozzi, in his turn, left Yver
don and retrod the road to Neuhof. Schmid, his
inseparable, his alter ego, having at least the merit
of fidelity, accompanied him in his retirement.
With pleasure he saw once more his chosen place of
abode, where he had cherished his first schemes for
the intellectual emancipation of the poor. Incor
rigible in his hopes, he still had thoughts of founding
a boys' school there. But death was drawing nigh.
. . . "Soon shall I see the celestial light," said he.
A few tokens of public recognition softened the
melancholy of his last days. Life dealt harshly with
him, but posterity is kind, and its kindness seems to
have begun for him before he closed his eyes forever.

62 PESTALOZZI

In 1825, he was enthusiastically welcomed by the
annual assembly of the Swiss Society, of which for
twenty-nine years he had been a member: he was
acclaimed president for the following year. In
1826, he visited an orphanage, where the children
presented him with a wreath of oak. To the very
end, however, vexations were not spared him. On his
death-bed he had to endure the insults of Fellenberg,
who dared to reproach this most disinterested of men
with having appropriated the funds from the sub
scriptions received for the first complete edition of
his works, Cotta's edition ; and also the odious abuse
of Biber's pamphlet, which appeared in 1827: "I
must live for six weeks longer/ ' exclaimed the dying
man, "that I may answer these base calumnies!"
But his strength forsook him. He had overtaxed
his robust constitution, which he delighted to char
acterize in these words: "I have the health of a
bear;'7 and on the 17th of February, 1827, he ex
pired peacefully, saying: "I die without regret.
I forgive my enemies and bless my friends. . . ."
At Birr, thirty men and thirty women, no more,
followed the funeral procession of one of Switzer
land's most illustrious children.

VI

THE story of Pestalozzi's life, as has just been
seen, is interwoven with his practical education work.
It reveals to us in all their splendour the high moral
qualities with which he was endowed. It shows,
throughout the vicissitudes of a long, wandering,
agitated existence, a perpetual striving towards the
final establishment of a method of instruction and
education for the people.

What was this method ? There is, let us confess,
considerable difficulty in defining it. Some critics
have got over this difficulty, somewhat lightly, by
saying that Pestalozzi had none. The fact is that
he himself did not succeed in expressing it by settled
formulas. It remained vague and uncertain in
a brain which, in its state of ferment, was fitter
for passionate conception than for the arrangement
of abstract thought. Destutt de Tracy wrote, in
1807, to Maine de Biran, that he suspected that
"the method of which there was so much talk was
not yet properly unravelled in the mind of its author."
This was perfectly true. Pestalozzi made deep re-

64 PESTALOZZI

search but arrived at no conclusion. He conceived
great things and started off to accomplish them;
he strove hard and overtaxed himself to carry them
into execution, but he did not succeed. The truth
is that his work was left unfinished. ' i His theories/'
said Steinmuller, in 1803, ' ' followed his experiments ; "
and as he experimented throughout his life, his
theories varied. In 1817, in a letter to Niederer,
he spoke of the " elaboration of his method": this
was an admission that at this date it was not yet
settled. In 1820, he rejected as immature the ideas
which he had set forth, in 1801, in his Lettres a
Gessner.1 The confusion is increased by the fact
that his commentators, profiting from what inde
cision there is in his thought, have often interpreted
it according to their own ideas : they have disfigured,
distorted, and even obscured it. One recalls what
an Yverdon scholar, the historian Vuillemin, said
concerning it in his Souvenirs, written, however,
fifty years later: "What went by the name of Pes-
talozzi's ' Method' was an enigma to us. It was
an enigma to our professors themselves. Like the
disciples of Socrates, each understood the master's

1 We say Lettres a Gessner for brevity. The correct title of the
work is Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt. Gertrude, the heroine of the
novel Leonard, does not, however, appear in the book. She became
the symbolic name which represents the perfect mother and ideal
teacher as conceived by Pestalozzi.

PESTALOZZI 65

doctrine in his own way ; and a day came when, after
each had given himself out as the only one who had
understood Pestalozzi, they all finished by declaring
that Pestalozzi had not understood himself."

It is not impossible, however, to distinguish,
through the various and at times contradictory
processes which he tried in turn, the essential char
acteristics of the method which he wished to insti
tute, and the dominant ideas which governed his
teaching and composed the unity of his pedagogic
life. Disciples have even been found intrepid
enough to undertake the task of a systematic clas
sification of Pestalozzi's ideas, a labour hardly
warranted by his impulsive and changing genius.
Jullien,1 in his Expose de la Methode, a crude and
ponderous work, distinguishes in it as many as twelve
fundamental principles, and also twelve essential
characteristics, neither more nor less. The model
is distorted and the original travestied by the claim,

1 Jullien (Marc-Antoine), called Jullien of Paris, son of the
Member of the National Convention, Jullien of Dr6me, went to
Yverdon, in 1810, and stayed there for some months. He had
played a part in military and political affairs under the orders of
Bonaparte, from whom he seceded on the 18th Brumaire. At
a later date he was again taken into favour and was intrusted with
missions in Italy: it was during one of these missions that he
visited Pestalozzi's institute. It was Jullien who founded, under
the Restoration, le Constitutionel newspaper. He took a rather active
part in the July revolution.

66 PESTALOZZI

with this analytical excess and profusion of divisions,
to imprison and catalogue in hard and fast formulas
the varied inspirations of a mind which was always
in motion and which could never come to a final de
cision.

There is one ruling idea which must at the out
set be insisted upon: this is the idea of intuition
(Anschauung), considered as the starting-point of
all knowledge, and consequently as the basis of all
instruction. We should approach the truth very
nearly, if we defined Pestalozzi as "the pedagogue
of intuition." — "What have I done," said he,
"that is my personal work ? I laid down the higher
principle ruling the science of education, on the day
when I recognized in intuition the absolute prin
ciple of all knowledge." It is true that Comenius
and Basedow, before him, had perceived the same
truth and attempted to apply it.

What, then, is intuition ? It is not only the exter
nal perception of the senses. Intuition extends to
the experiences of the inner consciousness, to senti
ment and emotion as much as to sensation. "In
tuition is the immediate impression which the physi
cal and moral worlds produce on our external and
internal senses." Intuition is direct personal ex
perience; and if sensible perceptions should form
the foundation of intellectual education, moral

PESTALOZZI 67

perceptions, sentiments of love, confidence., and grati
tude, early developed in the child's conscience, will
become the firm and sure support of his moral edu
cation.

Let us clearly understand Pestalozzi's thought.
Too often the common instruction presents to the
child, at the very outset of his studies, abstract
and general notions, which do not correspond to
anything in his experience. He is told of rivers
and oceans, without having seen even a pond or
a brook; of mountains and river basins, without
having climbed even a hillock. He is taught the
great words duty and virtue, without first having the
moral sentiments awakened in his heart. Thus is
the edifice raised upon the sand. An unploughed
field is sown ; or, indeed, scraps of knowledge which
cannot lodge and take root in the mind are laid, as
it were, on the surface of a fragile memory. They
are like signboards which, lightly fastened to an
insecure and badly made wall, are carried away
by the first breath of wind.

It was this superficial instruction of the old
"Gothic and monastic" schools that Pestalozzi
wished to sweep away. Close those schools in which
the master alone, or indeed the book, acts, and
open, instead, the school in which the child, invited
to make use of his senses and exercise his conscious-

68 PESTALOZZI

ness, finds in himself the principle of his activity,
the support of his intellectual and moral develop
ment, and the seed from which, by a progressive
evolution, the human personality issues, educated,
enlightened, and virtuous, like a living organism,
in the same way that the tree issues from the acorn.
Intuition alone can plant this seed in the mind.
And that is why Pestalozzi, discarding books and
suppressing the abuse of didactic lessons, aspires to
placing the child in the presence of the things. "Do
not cast him into the labyrinth of words, before
forming his mind by a knowledge of realities."
"The child requires no intermediary between nature
and himself." He often repeated, "Nature does
everything."

Let it not be imagined, however, that Pestalozzi
put his trust in the natural tuitions, as offered to us
by our senses and our consciousness, in their com
plexity and crudity. They must come to maturity
as the result of a slow analysis. A phrase which is
constantly recurring, like a refrain, in the Lettres a
Gessner is that it is a question of leading the child
" from confused intuition to clear perception," that
he must be raised "from vague intuition to precise
idea." What does this mean, if not that nature's
education is insufficient, that primitive intuition
needs elucidation and analysis, in short that there

PESTALOZZI 69

is an "art of intuition"? And this art consists in
organizing a series of methodically arranged exer
cises, which are brought to the child's attention
one after the other.

How should these exercises be arranged ? Accord
ing to a principle clearly laid down by Pestalozzi and
developed by Herbart, the principle of "gradation,"
or, if you will, of "concentration." Let us distrust
the parcelling out which is too much practised in
ordinary studies and in lessons in which incoherent
notions having no mutual connection are juxta
posed without any order, like ill-fitting pieces of
a badly adjusted mosaic. Just as knowledge re
quires a fulcrum, which is supplied by intuition,
so it needs connection and an order of development,
and in this the method consists. The various no
tions which compose elementary education are offered
to the child "in continuous, unbroken succession."
To each intuition are joined, as to a parent idea,
all the facts which belong to the same class of ideas.
There is never any lack of continuity between the
studies of one day and the next. Care is taken,
however — and this is a point to which Pestalozzi
insistently returns — to keep back the pupil on each
exercise, with calculated deliberation, until he has
thoroughly mastered it. He is only permitted to
take a step forward, to advance a little farther, when

70 PESTALOZZI

he has firmly assured his progress on the ground
already traversed. Nothing is more at variance
with a good educational method than too rapid
a passage from one study to another, without being
sure that the preceding knowledge is completely
acquired, and that it makes the knowledge which
follows both possible and easy. "Everything that
is not perfect in the germ will be abortive in its
growth." Moreover, it is a great evil, in education,
to be satisfied with less than " quite " ; and it is impor
tant to accustom a child to doing well whatever he
does, so that he "may aim at perfection." Madame
de Stael said, "There is no 'almost' in Pestalozzi's
method."

In the gradation and disposition of the exercises
which he recommends for making first intuitions
bear fruit, Pestalozzi claims, moreover, to follow
nature's order. Now nature wills us to go, not
from the simple to the compound, — which is an
equivocal and highly debatable statement, — but
from the nearer to the more remote, which is a much
clearer recommendation. A child's observation
should radiate from what he touches and sees around
him, to what is situated in the neighbourhood, and
gradually to more distant objects. "Knowledge
begins around man, and thence extends in ever
widening circles."

PESTALOZZI 71

In order to give at once an example of the applica
tion of this principle, let us draw attention to the
exercises on intuition and language, which, in the
Manuel des Meres,1 Pestalozzi — or rather his
disciple, Krusi, who drew up three-quarters of this
little volume — proposed for the pupils of the in
stitute at Burgdorf. There is nothing nearer us
than our own body. A child must then, before all
else, be trained to know, and to be able to name, all
the parts of his body. Did not Jean Mace, when
writing the Histoire d'une bouchee de pain, draw
inspiration from Pestalozzi's idea ? The pupil must,
as in a litany, mention in detail the lips, the bones of
the lower lip, the bones of the upper lip, the mouth,
the corners of the mouth, the right corner of the
mouth, etc. Certainly these exercises in language ex
pose themselves to ridicule: they occupy more than
fifty pages. The French critic, Dussaulx, said hu
morously, " Pestalozzi takes great pains to teach his
pupils that their nose is in the middle of their face !"

The idea, stripped of the grotesque childishness
in which it pleased Krusi to envelop it, is, never
theless, not to be disdained in itself. Maine de
Biran praised Pestalozzi for this very desire to begin
the development of the child's intuitive and reason-

1 The Manuel des Meres, published in 1803, was translated into
French in 1821.

72 PESTALOZZI

ing faculties by a descriptive analysis of the object
nearest to it, and most interesting for it to know;
that is, the human body. And especially is it of
importance to observe how, in the portions of the
book which he wrote, Pestalozzi ingeniously unites
with the enumeration of each of our organs the study
of their functions; and how the analysis of these
functions itself leads to a series of useful observa
tions concerning the objects with which our organs
put us in communication, with men, animals, and
plants, with everything that can be seen or heard.
In a phrase which is, as it were, the rapid recapitu
lation of all his pedagogics, Pestalozzi wrote: "For
each branch of knowledge there should be series
of exercises having their starting-point within reach
of all (intuition), and with a regular sequence (gra
dation), which would keep the child's faculties con
stantly at work, without exhausting or even tiring
them, and would contribute to continuous, easy,
and attractive progress/7 Everything essential in
the Pestalozzian method is contained in these few
lines: the principle of intuition, that of rigorous
connection between successive teachings; and also
two other principles of which we have yet to speak,
which, moreover, depend on those already mentioned ;
namely, that there is no other good method of
education than that which trains the activity, and

PESTALOZZI 73

that which, as a natural consequence, excites the
interest.

The extension of positive knowledge is of less
importance than the intensive development of the
faculties, strengthened and enlarged by exercise.
Intellectual growth, indeed, depends on exercise
and continued action. " Nature," said Pestalozzi,
in the Soiree d'un ermite, as early as 1780, " nature
develops all the forces of humanity by exercise, and
their growth proceeds from their use." It is neces
sary for the child to act, for his eyes, his voice, and
also his hands to be constantly occupied. No more
sluggish reading then, or long, mechanical recitations.
No more of those sleepy, half-dead classes, in which
a routine-bound master dictates or expounds his
knowledge to poor patients, who content themselves
with submitting to monotonous lessons, with more
or less wandering attention, but certainly with
weariness. The true school is the one in which
everybody acts, the pupils as well as the master.
"The teacher speaks; he pronounces sentences and
the pupils repeat them. The teacher asks questions :
the pupils reflect and reply. Long expositions are
tiring; questions excite and enliven. Action, the
source of happiness in life, is also the condition of
progress in school. Let us unceasingly enliven and
awaken the intelligence. Let us make the active

74 PESTALOZZI

faculties, attention and judgment, predominate
over the passive faculties, such as memory, and for
mechanical education let us substitute active in
struction which stimulates the attention, stirs the
will, and sets in motion the inner forces of the
mind."

It will perhaps be objected that this appeal to
activity does not seem to be in accordance with
what is known of Pestalozzi's academic practice and
with the unbounded ardour which he himself dis
played in his teaching. Did he, full of activity as
he was, allow an opportunity for the pupils to make
their initiative apparent? At Stans he is depicted
for us as continually in motion, going from one end
of the class room to the other, harassing the pupils
and giving them not one moment's respite. At
Burgdorf, "he bawled out the ABC from morn till
night/ ' in a stentorian voice, until he made himself
hoarse; and he pretended that the children took
an extreme pleasure in repeating for hours after
him b a, ba. To which Ramsauer, one of his pupils,
replied ironically, "It was enough rather to drive
away their guardian angels! . . ." None the less
is it true that the master's activity summons the
activity of the pupil. Flaubert wrote somewhere :
"Instruct yourselves, enlightened classes. Before
sending the people to school, go there yourselves!"

PESTALOZZI 75

In the same way, one can say to teachers: "You
wish to interest the children? Begin by interesting
yourselves in your teaching. It is impossible to
communicate an emotion not felt by one's self, or to
make others share in a taste in which one does not
participate. It is necessary to give before one can
hope to receive."

There is no doubt that, in practice, Pestalozzi
often contradicted himself. In spite of his good
intentions, he himself fell back into routine and
mechanical teaching. As a general rule, however,
Pestalozzi's exuberant and boisterous activity formed
no obstacle to the activity of his pupils, whilst, on
the contrary, its aim and result was to provoke and
sustain such activity. If he was restless, it was to
encourage the hard-working in their ardour and to
awaken the indolent from their torpor. If he acted,
it was to make others act. He set the example of
movement and effort, an example which was fol
lowed. Is not the true means of calling others to life
to begin by being alive one's self?

An active instruction, in which the master points
out the way, but lets the child walk, in which he
exerts himself principally in providing opportunities
for observation and personal reflection, does not
merely result in directly preparing education's work,
that is to say, the formation of the human faculties.

76 PESTALOZZI

It contributes indirectly to the same result, by
exciting the interest and by profiting from the charm
which well-directed studies inspire: not indeed
the charm which dispenses with effort, and which
tends to transform serious study into puerile amuse
ment, but, on the contrary, the charm which insures
effort by assisting it. Pestalozzi, who owed some
thing to Basedow and the Philanthropiniste school,
did not fall like them, however, into the puerilities
of amusing instruction. Should not everything
contribute to making instruction "attractive," —
Pestalozzi used the word before Mr. Herbert Spencer,
— in a system of education in which everything
aspired to being brightness and light, in which truth,
issuing from intuition, rendered useless those long
verbose explanations, which are about as efficacious,
for illumining the mind and dissipating error, as
the ringing of bells is efficacious for driving away
threatened storms; and in which, lastly, the most
ingenious methods were contrived, so as to proceed
by easy stages and impel the intelligence from easy
things to those more difficult, and at last to procure
for the pupil the great joy of activity?

Such was, indeed, Pestalozzi's preoccupation.
When, in 1816, he received a visit at Yverdon from
Andre Bell, who was, with Lancaster, the propa
gator in England of mutual instruction, he oblig-

PESTALOZZI 77

ingly expounded his method to him. Bell, in his
turn, explained his. The two pedagogues came
into touch, but their minds did not unite* Bell
left without being touched by the Pestalozzian grace.
He found, as it were, nothing deserving praise in
the rules followed at Yverdon, although Pestalozzi
had explained them to him at length. He had told
him how, among all the possible motives for activity,
• — if he excluded amour propre as far as possible,
if he reckoned on attachment to duty and on affec
tion for parents and masters, — he placed interest
in study first and foremost, that interest which in
struction cannot fail to excite when it is simple,
familiar, progressive, and exactly adjusted to the
degree of intellectual development in each child.
One last point to be noted in the general charac
teristics of Pestalozzi's method is the great care
which he took in simplifying the processes of instruc
tion, in simplifying them to such a degree that their
manipulation was made easy even for the unlearned.
The intention was praiseworthy, but the inference
was excessive and false. " You wish to make teach
ing mechanical," Pestalozzi was told one day; and
Pestalozzi joyfully acquiesced in this unlooked-
for definition of his method. He dreamed, in fact,
of a harmony of processes simple and precise enough
for the least-prepared teacher, the least-informed

78 PESTALOZZI

mother, an elder sister, or even a devoted servant,
to be able to apply it with good results. He cher
ished the chimera of a method which should owe its
entire efficacy to the perfection of its arrangements
and not to the ability of those who put it into prac
tice: like a machine so perfect in the precision of
its component parts that the least skilled workman
can work it. Simplification is the great art, said
he, and, in the exaggeration of his thought, he went
so far as to say that the normal schools and the scho
lastic libraries were quite unnecessary for the for
mation of the people's educators, that in the future
it would be sufficient to put into the hands of any
teacher that Livre des Meres, of which he spoke so
much in his Lettres a Gessner, but which he never
found time to write. In this he was false to him
self ; for never was there a teacher who spared him
self so little and put as much of his heart and soul
into his practical work of education. But he sus
pected that it would be very difficult, if not impos
sible, when education should be generalized and made
universal, to require from the innumerable teachers,
scattered throughout the multitude of schools, the
ardour and enthusiasm which he himself possessed.
And this is why he considered the success of element
ary education, in the future of mankind, as insepa
rable from and conditional upon the invention of

PESTALOZZI 79

an instrument, a pedagogic machine, whose perfec
tion should reduce the workmanship almost to noth
ing. Let us add, to say all, that this great friend
of the school allowed himself at times to consider
it as a kind of makeshift, a temporary expedient
to which we are condemned for a time by the igno
rance of our parents and their disheartening lack
of aptitude for educating their own children. It was
not only with a view to the careful treatment of
the frail intelligence of children that he projected
his plan for simplifying methods. It was principally
to make his supreme dream, the education of a child
by its mother, capable of realization. He would
willingly have consented to the disappearance of
the elementary school and the institution in its
stead of the "family room," in which an attentive,
tender mother, workwoman, or peasant, as well as
woman of the middle classes, armed Vith her Manuel,
would herself instruct her sons and daughters.

From these essential principles are derived the
processes devised by Pestalozzi: inventions which,
for the greater part, are ingenious rather than sound,
and evidence more good will than skill and ability.

Let us remark first — we have already given it
to be understood — that Pestalozzi, in practice,
was often untrue to his theoretical maxims. The
apostle of intuition and nature's education did not

80 PESTALOZZI

allow the natural laws sufficient freedom of action,
and he subjected intuition to rules which were arti
ficial in the extreme. He claimed to educate the
child in the liberty of its aspirations and the spon
taneity of its inclinations, but round about it he
wove a close, imprisoning network of minute method
ical exercises, in which its spontaneity ran great
risk of disappearing, and its initiative is constrained
and crushed. A story is told concerning a man
who kept bees, and, being of a very inventive turn
of mind, reflected one day that the bees really
took too much trouble in flying here and there, going
from garden to garden and from flower to flower,
in order to gather their honey. He then conceived
the idea of himself gathering them a heap of flowers
of every species and carefully making them into
bunches which he placed ready-made in front of
the hives. . . . The story does not tell whether
the bees gave up their free cross-country flight and
chance harvest; nor whether those, if any there
were, who satisfied themselves with the flowers
whose spoil had been made ready for them, had
better honey in their combs. ... Is not this
almost the image of the attempt in which Pestalozzi
went astray when he thought it necessary to sub
mit the child to the necessity of imprisoning its
thought in rigid lists of objects, systematically

PESTALOZZI 81

arranged, instead of allowing relative liberty to
the course of its observations? It has been said,
and not altogether wrongly, that the application of
the Pestalozzian methods would be disastrous and
fatal to the imagination. The flight of a child's
intelligence must be guided but not restrained. It
is no more appropriate to put a new-born babe under
the yoke of a geometrical discipline, in order to
accustom it to observe and reflect, than it would
be to employ a sergeant-at-arms to teach it to walk.
At the risk of a few stumbles let us let the child try
to walk by itself. At the risk of coming to wrong
conclusions in its researches and making more than
one mistake, let us be willing for it to look to right
and left, examining freely according to its fancy.
On this condition alone will it learn to think for
itself; whilst on the other hand an excessive sys
tem of rules would oppress and destroy that natural
spontaneity which must be respected, if we wish to
train flexible intelligences, rich in imagery and idea,
and to form free minds.

Nothing can better throw light upon what was
artificial and false in Pestalozzi's methods, than the
satirical, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, picture
which Ramsauer drew of the exercises to which
he was himself subjected during his stay in the
institution at Burgdorf. "What we did best,"

82 PESTALOZZI

said he, "were the language exercises, especially
those having as their subject the old tapestry, all
in holes, which Pestalozzi forced us to consider in
all its details for hours at a time. — Children, what
do you see ? — I see a hole in the tapestry. — Good ;
repeat after me: I see a hole in the tapestry. . . .
I see a long hole in the tapestry. . . . Behind the
tapestry, I see the wall, etc. . . ." These somewhat
grotesque exercises were, in truth, only a caricature
of intuitive teaching. Instead of the torn and worn-
out tapestry, which Pestalozzi made his pupils
study because of the poverty of his scholastic ap
pliances, and of which the particularized analysis
was scarcely able to excite the interest which he
considered nevertheless to be the principle of prog
ress in study, why did he not show them natural
objects, genuine material for lessons on well-under
stood things of which the examination would not have
been merely an occasion for wearisome exercises in
language, but which might have given rise to a series
of interesting observations and have prepared for
the acquisition of as many useful and practical
pieces of information? And in the tapestry itself,
however wretched that object of study may have
been, should he not have called his pupils7 atten
tion to something more than accidents of form and
shape, or the length, breadth, and number of holes,

PESTALOZZI 83

— have taught them, for example, of what textile
substances it was made, what workmen had pro
duced it, and for what purposes it was intended ? . . .
By a singular contradiction with his own prin
ciples, then, Pestalozzi forgot reality and nature, to
linger over questions of vocabulary. In so doing,
he claimed, however, that he was applying one of
his favourite theories, to which he wrongly attached
prime importance. I refer to the famous classi
fication which consisted in bringing all elementary
knowledge under three heads, a kind of trilogy:
number, shape, and word, or, in other terms, arith
metic, geometry, and language. In the simplicity
of his somewhat narrow philosophy, Pestalozzi
flattered himself that in this he had made a great
discovery. He brought forward his theory as a
sort of marvellous revelation, brought to him, as
he said, by a Deus ex machina, to extricate him from
difficulty, in the midst of his laborious researches,
like a flash of light which all at once illuminated
"his vague, irresolute reveries." What captivated
him was that he thought he had by this theory
separated the essential part of things from what is
accessory and the qualities common to all objects
from those which are merely accidental. Every
thing that has a material existence, indeed, has
a shape; all objects can be counted and added up;

84 PESTALOZZI

lastly, they can all be expressed in words. But
to begin with, why make a separate category for
the "word," since the "word" is the expression
of all thought, whatever its nature, and since unities
can be counted and shapes defined only by means
of words? Further, do not natural objects possess
other qualities common to them all ? Should Pesta-
lozzi, who often mentions the Appenzell women,
on account of their habit of hanging paper birds of
many colours on the cradles of new-born children,
have forgotten that colour also is a universal quality
of things ? And why should not the composition of
bodies, their uses, causes, and effects, be given a
place in elementary study? A child is not truly
educated if it can only calculate, measure, and talk.
If its knowledge goes no farther it will be deficient
in all the useful knowledge which the natural and
physical sciences contain. A calculator and geome
trician, it has grasped only the two abstractions of
shape and number from amongst the complex reali
ties of the world and animated nature.

It would be profitless to dwell on a narrow, paltry
conception, which proves to what a degree those
minds which have most thoroughly freed themselves
from the old routines are themselves liable to create
new ones. We will only retain one of its articles:
the importance which Pestalozzi rightly accorded

PESTALOZZI 85

to the study of words. Language, when it responds
to clear intuitions, when it is the correct expression
of precise, plain thought, is, indeed, as he considered
it, the essential instrument for the liberation of the
mind. And Pestalozzi cannot be too highly praised
for having applied himself to the discovery of prac
tical means of establishing a strict adaptation of
word to idea, in the consciousness and on the lips
of the child. "If the peoples of Europe," said he,
"have fallen so low, it is because, in the popular
schools, such importance has been given to words
devoid of meaning that not only attention to nat
ural impressions, but even the faculty of receiving
such impressions, has been destroyed in the human
mind. Children have not been taught to speak. ..."
Language should be learned by use, and, as has
been said, Pestalozzi did away with grammar as
though by magic. It is true that here again he did not
proscribe artificial mechanism with sufficient severity.
Thus, impatient and in haste to develop his pupils' vo
cabulary rapidly, he made them learn by heart long
lists of words, which related to nothing within their
experience. Thus, also, he wrongly extended the
language exercises beyond the circle of intuitions al
ready acquired. In the same way, under the pretext
that ability to describe must precede ability to define,
he made them recite ready-made descriptions, — for

86 PESTALOZZI

example, descriptions of walking or of being seated.
The adversary of book education and school chatter
came to grief himself over a fresh form of verbiage.
"My system/7 said he, "is a refinement of nature."
He refined, indeed, and to excess. See, for example,
how he understood the study of drawing. Nature,
according to him, does not give lines to the child:
it presents objects in the varied complexity of their
forms. From which, it would seem, he should logi
cally have concluded that, in its first attempts at
drawing, the child should be trained to represent
things as it sees them. This is by no means his
conclusion : he asked, on the contrary, that the child
be made to trace lines, arcs, and angles. In this, he
went against the primitive instinct of both human
ity and infancy. Are we not taught by travellers
that, amongst African tribes, for example, the notion
of the right angle is unknown, and that in Abyssinia
as well as in the Congo, the houses and huts are
usually round? Abstraction predominates in that
peculiar A B C de Virtiuition, in which Pestalozzi
claimed to reduce the diversity of natural shapes to
geometrical forms.1 One feels inclined to smile at

1 Let us take note, however, that M. Eugene Guillaume, an
other expert in these matters, agrees with Pestalozzi, and wishes
the apprentice draughtsman to begin with the study of geometrical
lines. This practice is the one which has prevailed. The Pesta-
lozzian idea, as the inspiring principle, has entered all schools.

PESTALOZZI 87

the declaration made in all seriousness, "If I have
had a merit in my life, it is that I placed the square
at the base of intuitive education." Luckily,
Pestalozzi had other merits! Ravaisson,1 an ex
pert in these matters, wrote: "They were greatly
in error who wished to restore the art of drawing
to a kind of science founded on geometry. This
was an invention of Pestalozzi's, who thought that
he had thus found a means of putting drawing
within the reach of the middle classes." And Ra
vaisson concluded that "to simplify the contours
of things, so complicated in animated nature, by
bringing them back to straight lines and circles, was
to distort and debase the forms after the manner
of the materialists. . . ." Certainly there was no
trace of materialism in Pestalozzi's conception:
he simply gave way to the tendency of introducing
a precision quite geometrical into elementary studies.
The tendency became more pronounced at Yverdon,
where, under Schmid's influence, mathematics be
came the principal preoccupation. The Pere Girard
remarked on this in his Rapport officiel for 1808,
"I pointed out to my old friend Pestalozzi that
he allowed mathematics an inordinate measure of
dominion, and that I feared the results for educa-

1 See the article on Histoire de I'enseignement du dessin, in M. P.
Buisson's Dictionnaire de pedagogic.

88 PESTALOZZI

tion. . . ." Pestalozzi did not deny this, and re
plied with his customary vivacity, "That is because
I wish my children to believe nothing that cannot
be demonstrated to them as clearly as that two
and two make four."

It is not without surprise that we find an apostle
of nature, by an involuntary deviation from his
principles, using artificial methods of constraint
and regulation pushed to extremes. He said that
it is not to the forest or the meadow that a child
must be taken to teach it how to know trees and
plants. And he gave as his reason that, in the
forest and the meadow, trees and plants are mingled
and the vegetable species are mixed. Let us con
clude that he went somewhat at haphazard, vacillat
ing from one method to another, capable rather of
sudden inspiration than of sustained reflection.
" Every day I feel how unknown to me are the re
sults of my method." He would have been no less
at a loss to arrange its so often irreconcilable rules.

In many matters he made happy innovations;
he applied the principle of intuition. At Yverdon
he taught geography by direct observation in the
neighbouring valleys or on the Jura mountains. The
pupils brought back from their excursions supplies
of clay which they afterwards used to reproduce in
relief the valley which they had studied on the

PESTALOZZI 89

spot. It was only after several days' work, when
the relief was finished, that they passed on to the
study of maps. It is to Pestalozzi that Carl Ritter,
the celebrated German geographer, ascribes the
merit of the inspiration which had directed him
in his work. "Pestalozzi," said he, "did not know
as much geography as a child in our primary schools ;
it was, however, whilst talking to him, during my
repeated visits to Yverdon, that I felt the impulse
towards natural methods awaken in me."

How many processes, now familiar in the schools
of every country in the world, were initiated by
Pestalozzi ! How many teachers are Pestalozzians
without knowing it ! He was perhaps the first to
subordinate reading to oral exercises, which was a
most important reform. For teaching how to speak
he did not always rely on the old Burgdorf tapestry :
he asked that the child be shown objects which please
it and captivate its attention, and that it be made
to touch and understand them. He put off reading
as long as he could. The child should be able to
talk before learning to read. For reading he used
movable letters, each pasted on a card, so that, by
bringing them together, all the syllabic combinations
could be displayed. To strike the senses, he had
multitudinous little inventions: thus, the vowels
were coloured red. A proceeding to which he was

90 PESTALOZZI

much attached was rhymed spelling: the pupils
repeated in chorus the letter or syllable which they
were deciphering. He placed writing after drawing :
" Writing is a kind of special linear drawing which
is merely play for a child once its eyes and hand
have been suitably trained." For both writing and
drawing he recommended slate and pencil, which
should be preferred to pen and paper. He taught
arithmetic experimentally and by concrete methods.
Before conceiving numbers in abstracto, the pupil
should have grasped their material value by adding up
actual objects, cherries, nuts, etc. Before calculating
with the symbols 10, 12, he must have counted the
ten fingers of the hands and the twelve months of
the year. The first calculations should be made in
the head, mentally, without the help of paper.
Pestalozzi was truly one of the promoters of mental
calculation. His pupils at Burgdorf and Yverdon
acquired, in a short time, surprising deftness in these
exercises. In the same way, with geometry, mate
rial objects were first dealt with: "We invented
geometry," said an Yverdon pupil.

Elementary instruction, in Pestalozzi's scheme,
aimed at reaching every faculty, "the hands as much
as the head and heart," according to his own expres
sion. The educator's first duty is undoubtedly to
form men: "Apply yourself to developing children,

PESTALOZZI 91

not training them as dogs are trained." To this
general culture, however, some elements of pro
fessional education must be joined at an early stage.
Pestalozzi complained bitterly that the people had
no technical teaching at their disposal "except such
as concerns the art of killing men." He wished,
in consequence, to introduce into the school, if not
an apprenticeship to this or that given trade, at
least a sort of general preparation for every trade.
He dreamed of compiling a technical A B C, in which
he would set forth graduated exercises on the element
ary actions, — carrying, throwing, drawing, push
ing, brandishing, twisting. The child would thus
learn from it to develop its physical aptitudes, and
would acquire that suppleness of movement and
skill in the use of the organs which the practice of
every trade exacts.

Exercise, experience, practice, — these, then, are
the conditions of education in all its forms, the con
ditions of moral culture as well as intellectual evolu
tion. If it be true that a teacher can especially
communicate to his pupils the qualities which he
himself possesses, how can one doubt that Pesta
lozzi particularly excelled in moral education?
Here, again, intuition is the principle. No pre
cepts, no lessons according to rule. I do not find
that Pestalozzi ever thought of drawing up a code

92 PESTALOZZI

of theoretical or practical morality. Had he done
so, he would have nearly approached Kant's doc
trines, as, for example, this fine maxim would prove :
"When I improve myself, I make of what I should
the rule for what I would." No ; but in relying upon
the child's good feelings, cleverly aroused, he claimed
to establish a natural and organic development of
practical morality : the free training of personality.
As his pupil speaks before being able to read, as
he sings, intuitively, because he has heard others
singing, before knowing a single note of music, so
he is to be virtuous, without virtue having been men
tioned to him. In his optimism, Pestalozzi thought
it sufficient to awaken the latent forces of the con
science, in order to lead humanity to practise well
doing. "At Stans," said he, "I taught neither
morality nor religion." But by developing in his
eighty little orphans a brotherly love and, as it were,
a family pride, he thought to direct them surely tow
ard sentiments of justice and honour. "I strove,"
said he, "to arouse the sentiment of each virtue
before pronouncing its name." In other terms it
was on the heart and on the sensibility that he
wished to build up morality. It was by the heart
that he influenced his pupils, not by the dry author
ity of abstract teaching. No master has succeeded
in making himself loved as he was. "We loved

PESTALOZZI 93

him," declared one of his pupils; "we all loved him,
because we knew that he loved us all." Was it
not he, moreover, who said, " Education should be
benevolence and continued kindness"?

He sought every possible opportunity of urging the
children to display their generous instincts, and also
of accustoming them to overcome their bad dis
positions. Often has this touching passage been
quoted from that one of his letters to Gessner which
he wrote in 1799, during the few weeks which he
spent at Gurnigel: "When news of the burning of
Altorf reached us at Stans, I gathered together my
little orphans and said to them: ' Altorf is burned
down; perhaps at this moment a hundred poor
children are without shelter, bread, and clothes.
Would you like us to ask our good government to
send us twenty or thirty of them, that we may
receive them in this house ? ' And with a unanimous
voice, ' Yes ! yes ! ' they answered. — ' But, chil
dren/ I added, ' our house is poor : reflect. If these
poor children are given you for comrades you will
have less to eat, you will have more work to do;
perhaps you will be obliged to share your clothes
with them/ After having spoken thus to them,
with all the force of which I was capable, I made
them repeat my words, in order to assure myself
that they had properly understood me. Then I

94 PESTALOZZI

again put the question, and they all replied: 'Yes!
yes ! even should we have less food and more work,
we should be pleased for them to come with us.' "
It was not from the school that Pestalozzi expected
the most efficacious influence in this stirring up of
the generous emotions: he relied principally upon
the family, and in the family, on the action of the
mother. Sentiments of love and gratitude have
their chief origin in the relations which exist between
the mother and the little child. It is the mother
who sows love in the heart of the babe at her breast.
Pestalozzi placed the mother above all, the loving
mother, careful for her duties. "The essential
thing, young mother, is for your child to prefer you
to all else, and for you, on your side, to prefer noth
ing to it." Nothing is so touching as the repeated
appeals which he addressed to maternal love in his
thirteenth Lettre a Gessner. Rousseau's invocations
seem cold beside them. It was in vain that he was
told: " Mothers, such as you wish for, you will not
find ! To escape their duties they will pretext the
necessities of their work and the obligations of the
workshop." He replied with enthusiasm: "I wish
to succeed in convincing even the pagan mothers
of the most remote regions of the universe. And
I trust in the mothers of my country, I trust in the
hearts which God has placed in their breasts!"

PESTALOZZI 95

If the mother is to reveal the moral emotions, she
is also to initiate the child in religious sentiments.
Pestalozzi's religion was a sincere religion, full of
sentimental effusions, which were almost mystic
and devout. At Neuhof he blamed himself when
he missed saying his prayers, as though he had com
mitted a crime. It was with his heart that he
believed in God. "The God of my brain is a chi
mera; I know no other God than the God of my
heart; and it is only by my faith in the God of my
heart that I feel myself a man. Mother, mother,
by your commandments you showed God to me,
and by my obedience I found Him. . . . Mother,
mother, if I love you, I love God, and my duty
is my supreme delight. . . ." The mother, then, is
the intermediary between the child and God. It is
filial love which leads to divine love. Pestalozzi
rejected from his faith the dogmas of Christianity,
but he retained its spirit. True religion, said he,
is nothing else than morality. Very indulgent
towards simple piety, — "I am not of those who
turn to ridicule the rosary and prayer-book of poor
people/7 - he was himself satisfied with adoring
and invoking the infinite Bounty, the Love which
permeates all things. And it was even in this form
that he wished God to be presented to the child:
" After teaching it on her bosom to lisp the name

96 PESTALOZZI

of the Divinity, the mother will show it the universal
Love, in the rising sun, the bubbling stream, the
pearly dewdrops on the plants, and the bright colours
of the flowers." *

As a whole, and in all its applications, Pestalozzi's
method — and this in no way lessens its merit -
remains a method of elementary education. The
gift which he received was for the education of the
little ones. The purpose of his life was solely and
exclusively the education of little children. He
had no other aptitude than that, and he knew very
well that infant instruction was all he had worked
for, and that he could succeed in nothing else.
"When setting my foot on the first step of Burg-
dorf castle, I felt myself lost : for I was entering upon
a career which could bring nothing but unhappiness

1 It has perhaps been noticed that Pestalozzi's writings no
where mention a special education for women. In truth, con
cerned, as he was principally, with elementary education, he did
not distinguish girls from boys in the primary schools at Neuhof,
Stans, and Burgdorf . He was in favour of the principle of coedu
cation in the case of infants. When he became director of the
institute at Yverdon, he took care to organize, in 1806, a special
institute for girls as an annex to the establishment. In 1807 he
put this special institute under the direction of his son's widow,
who had become Madame Custer. In 1808, the establishment
was reorganized and placed under the direction of Mademoiselle
Rosette Kasthofer, who married Niederer in 1814. It is none
the less true that Pestalozzi had no special views on female edu
cation.

PESTALOZZI 97

for me, having in no measure the powers and talents
which the direction of a college exacts." This has
been quite understood by the majority of his
critics also. Destutt de Tracy wrote: "Pestalozzi's
method will only yield its full promise when
applied to the teaching of those whose instruc
tion should be very restricted." And this was
Madame de Stae'Fs opinion also: "Pestalozzi's
work must be considered as at present limited
to infancy."

I am well aware, and we have already mentioned
it, that at times Pestalozzi pushed his designs far
ther. He was inspired with this ambition prin
cipally by his collaborators. Indeed, he wrote to
Maine de Biran: " People are wrong if they think
that my method should only expound the first
elements of knowledge and education. Youth also
must be governed in accordance with the same prin
ciples and spirit." In other words, he believed it
possible to extend his method of elementary educa
tion to secondary studies. Assuredly, in all degrees
of teaching, it is good for the master to be an ani-
mater of minds, for him to interrogate, to set in ac
tion, to stir up initiative and personal research, and
professors of every class have something to learn
at Pestalozzi's school. Nevertheless, it is evident
that a method which is above all intuitive, inductive,

98 PESTALOZZI

and experimental, as was Pestalozzi's, exactly suits
only the beginnings of instruction. Later, with
minds already formed, the didactic, deductive,
and expository method reclaims its rights; and in
this field Pestalozzi was quite unable to succeed.
Let him then be content with the glory which is
his, and which is already fine enough, — the glory
of having been one of the founders of the popu
lar school. This is his true domain, his kingdom,
at once the honour and the limit of his power as
an educator. For half a century he toiled, with
incomparable ardour, at the simplification of ele
mentary education. In 1816, he wrote to Nicolo-
vius: " If I do not succeed in preparing at least the
application of elementary instruction in the schools
for the poor, and in insuring its execution after
me, the essential thing in which I can still serve
humanity will be lost: I shall have laboured in

vain/7

No, he did not labour in vain, for if he did not quite
succeed in completing his work, yet will people not
cease to seek inspirations from his writings and
examples from his actions, to direct the child's first
steps : at the age when, as Madame de Stael said, it
seems "that the Creator still holds the creature by
the hand in order to help it walk gently on the
clouds of life;" an age at which it is, nevertheless,

PESTALOZZI 99

necessary for man's hand to intervene, a firm and
gentle hand, which guides without constraining,
which facilitates effort and clears the path of knowl
edge from all difficulties against which the child's
footsteps, still staggering and ill-assured, might
strike.

VII

PESTALOZZI'S influence has been considerable.
When, on the 12th of January, 1846, 1 twenty years
after his death, the anniversary of his birth was
celebrated in fifty-nine Swiss and German towns,
it could be seen, from the numbers and the zeal of
those who took part in the celebration, what a deep
and lasting power he had exercised over people's
minds, and to what a degree his ideas had spread
and had borne fruit throughout central Europe.
He was not mistaken when, in the preface to the
Manuel des Meres, he said, "The form of my
method will perish, but the life-giving spirit, the
spirit of my method, will survive." Diesterweg,2
the celebrated director of the Berlin Normal School,
who was the principal organizer of this commemora
tive ceremony, paid him glorious homage, in a speech
in which he drew a comparison between the schools

1 The anniversary was more particularly solemnized at Berlin
and Copenhagen.

2 Diesterweg fell into disfavor a short time after, and was forced
to retire in 1847. The zeal displayed by him in the service of
Pestalozzi's liberal pedagogy was not foreign to his revocation.

100

PESTALOZZI 101

of former days and those of the mid-nineteenth
century, and gave Pestalozzi credit for the changes
which had been accomplished. "His work/' said
he, "has become the foundation of German public
schools ;" and he went through the long list of Ger
man educators who more or less have their origin
in him. Further, effectively to honour the great
teacher's memory, he projected the organization
of an orphanage, to bear the name of Institut pes-
talozzien.

While yet alive, however, Pestalozzi had wit
nessed a triumphant propagation of his doctrine.
It has been said that he understood better "how
to raise ideas than men." How then account
for this multitude of disciples, whose calling he
determined, whom he inflamed with his enthusiasm,
who went into every land sowing the Pestalozzian
idea? Sometimes it only required an interview
or a few hours' conversation to win over an indiffer
ent visitor, or to make a new apostle of a passer-by :
as, for example, the young German baron, de Renne-
camp, who was for a few days a guest at the Yverdon
institution in 1808. He was received soon after
at Coppet, in Madame de StaeTs drawing-rooms, and
warmly praised Pestalozzi and his method. Whilst
he was speaking, one of his listeners, Madame
Recamier, said nothing, and busied herself arranging

102 PESTALOZZI

a curl of her beautiful hair. But Benjamin Constant,
who was also present at the gathering, whilst doubt
less looking at Madame Recamier, listened and asked
for fuller details concerning the reformer. Madame
de Stael also was attentive, and displayed a marked
curiosity, which she was to satisfy some months
later by visiting Yverdon. She applauded the
young interpreter of the method, whilst he explained
that the master of Yverdon, instead of making edu
cation's end the acquirement of knowledge, regarded
that only as a means, the true object being the
development of intelligence. And she prepared
her interview with Pestalozzi by the most flattering
compliments. She wrote to him, amongst other
things, "I am convinced that your methods are
able to compass the happiness of the majority of
your fellow-men, and particularly of the most un
happy and abandoned of mankind. . . ."

It was naturally in Germany that Pestalozzi's
influence was especially noticeable. Saxony and
Wtirttemberg owe to him in part their scholastic
progress. We have already stated the ties that
bound him to both Herbart and Fichte. The phi
losopher of. "ego" could not but be charmed with
a pedagogue who, above all, aspired to form the
human personality. In his public speeches, at the
moment when, after the defeat of Jena, Prussia

PESTALOZZI 103

was undertaking the reform of its schools, he hailed
Pestalozzi as "the man of genius who had eman
cipated the art of education from routine and em
piricism, in order to base it on the philosophic laws/7
And in a private letter addressed to his wife, he
recommended her in these terms to read the Lettres
a Gessner: "I find in this system of education the
true remedy for the sufferings of sick humanity,"
and also — a thing not likely to be displeasing to
a somewhat obscure thinker — "the only means
of fitting it for an understanding of my own phi
losophy." Froebel also should be counted among
Pestalozzi's admirers. He went to Yverdon for
the first time in 1805. He went back in 1808 and
lived there for two years with three pupils, whom
he accompanied to all the lessons at the institute.
"It was a decisive time in my life/7 he wrote. The
future creator of the "children's garden/7 and of the
maternal school, could not but feel drawn by a
secret sympathy towards the founder of the ele
mentary school which is its continuation.

The impulse given by Pestalozzi did not have
pedagogic theories and plans for school organization
as its only result. It also produced actual estab
lishments, a multitude of schools, made in the like
ness of those in which he taught, and especially
of that which was his dream. A volume would be

104 PESTALOZZI

required for the enumeration of all the founda
tions which owed their existence to him : in Berlin,
Plamann, who had been his auditor for some time,
opened a school in 1805 which remained in exist
ence until 1830; at Frankfort, which became a
centre of Pestalozzianism, there was Gruner's school,
in which Froebel taught ; at Mayence, F.-J. Miiller
founded a school about 1804. It is not sufficiently
well known in France to what a degree Pestalozzi
moved and dominated the German imagination.1
In 1808, one of the ministers of Wlirttemberg wrote,
"Our king has become a Pestalozzian from head to
foot." When, in 1809, Nicolovius, one of Pesta-
lozzi's old friends, was appointed director of public
instruction for the kingdom of Prussia, he asked
for his cooperation. "Come and help us/7 he wrote
to him; "what I dreamed with you at Neuhof is
about to become a reality. The seed which you
scatter here will germinate; it will become a tree,
whose shade will shelter a whole people. . . ."
The moment at which Pestalozzi heard that the
Prussian government was preparing to reorganize
the schools after his principles was one of great ex
pectation for him. He replied with childish joy:
"I shall not die then before the harvest which I
have sown approaches maturity. I have always

1 In 1870, Gutzkow, the novelist, published Fils de Pestalozzi.

PESTALOZZI 105

lived awaiting the coming of a king to whom should
be given the power necessary to benefit mankind.
You have found this king; he is there! . . ."

If the Germanic nations, as was natural, were
more especially affected by the Pestalozzian influ
ence, there is scarcely a district of Europe, in the
North as well as in the South, which has remained
foreign to the movement. Curiously enough, Spain,
which may still be fairly called one of the least
advanced of European nations as regards education,
was one of the first to attempt the introduction of
Pestalozzianism within her borders. Various trials
were made: firstly, in the school of a Tarragona
regiment, commanded by Voitel, a Swiss captain
in the Spanish service; again, in a normal school
organized at Santander, for training teachers in
the new method; and, lastly, in Madrid itself, in
a special school bearing the name of Real Institute
Pestalozziano militar : — in justification of the last
word let us recall that, at Burgdorf and Yverdon,
Pestalozzi had his pupils put through some military
exercises. The Madrid school was at first placed
under Captain VoiteFs direction, then under that of
Amoros, who became known later in France as the
propagator of gymnastic instruction. Pestalozzian
ism had its hour of ascendency. The infante, Don
Francis of Paola, was brought up after its methods,

106 PESTALOZZI

and the school for the poor became a school for
princes. This was the realization of Pestalozzi's
wish, that instruction should be the same for all.
But political events abruptly suspended the experi
ment; the Madrid Institute was closed in 1808,
and there was no more talk of Pestalozzi in Spain.
I can scarcely think of anybody but Comenius,
as whose successor Pestalozzi may be considered,
who spread so far across Europe the propagation of
his ideas. The Moravian pedagogue of the seven
teenth century has more than one point of resem
blance with the Swiss pedagogue of the eighteenth.
He indeed preceded him with his pedagogic presenti
ments. Like him, and to a greater degree, he led
a wandering, agitated life. This first evangelist of
modern education went to England and Sweden to
preach his faith in those countries. Pestalozzi cer
tainly did not make these long journeys; but his
doctrine at least circulated there, thanks to emis
saries who came to study it on the spot and to gather
it from his lips. Thus, in 1803, the Danish govern
ment sent to Burgdorf several teachers who, on
their return, opened a Pestalozzian school in Copen
hagen. Bonaparte's royal creatures showed less dis
dain than he for the A B C : Murat, king of Naples,
in 1872, and Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland, in
1807, tried to introduce Pestalozzi's methods into

PESTALOZZI 107

the schools of these two countries. Success, how
ever, did not always attend these imitative attempts.
Unskilled disciples grasped only the external form,
the mere mechanism, of the method, without being
able to borrow from the master the spirit which
animated the system and made it productive.

In England, the effort was often renewed and was
prolonged. Pestalozzi had received a number of
English visitors at Yverdon, among others Robert
Owen, the famous philanthropist, and Henry
Brougham, the champion of popular education, who
said with some emphasis : "The time is coming when
the teacher and not the cannon will be the arbiter
of the world." But it was especially with James
Greaves, a young thinker, rather obscure, moreover,
that Pestalozzi contracted a friendship. Greaves
stayed at Yverdon from 1817 till 1822; and, during
these four or five years, he became intimate with
Pestalozzi. He served him as an interpreter and
cicerone for English visitors, and was intrusted with
the teaching of English to the pupils of the normal
school at Clindy. Pestalozzi valued him highly
enough to say that "he of all men most completely
understood the end which he had in view." Greaves7
zeal was so ardent that he was not satisfied with
passionately espousing Pestalozzi's ideas and projects :
he cared for his person. It has been narrated that

108 PESTALOZZI

he suffered extremely from the neglected dress of
his master, who scarcely thought of making his toilet
except on great occasions and when visiting sover
eigns. He was grieved at the unfavourable impres
sion produced on strangers by his worn and ragged
clothes, "his old gray overcoat." What, then, did
he do? He discreetly ordered from a tailor new
suits, which were placed in the wardrobe, during
the night, in the place of the old ones. . . . Pesta-
lozzi made no comments, and, perhaps, in his absent-
mindedness, scarcely noticed the substitution. . . .
He returned Greaves' affection, and it was for him
that, in 1818 and 1819, he wrote the Lettres sur
I' education elementaire, which Greaves translated
into English, and published in London in 1827.1
This is perhaps the best exposition of his doctrine
that Pestalozzi produced. In it he renewed his
eloquent appeals to mothers, "to the mothers of
Great Britain." In it he insisted on the truism
that a pupil should not be a passive instrument,
that his education is not firmly based unless he
himself be the "agent." On his return to England,
Greaves founded a school at Ham, near Richmond,
in which he attempted to apply the Yverdon
methods. He had been preceded in Ireland by

1 We have a second edition of this work, published in 1850,
under our eyes.

PESTALOZZI 109

Synge, another great admirer of Pestalozzi, who,
after staying some months in Switzerland, published
in Dublin, between 1815 and 1817, several anony
mous works, in which he considered Pestalozzi's
life and analyzed his writings.1 He was followed
by the Reverend Dr. Mayo, who, in 1819, had taken
fifteen of his compatriots to Yverdon, and on his
return to England applied himself to bringing the
Pestalozzian methods within reach of all. Assisted
by Reiner, an Yverdon pupil, and also by his sister,
Miss Mayo, he organized a college and compiled a
certain number of books, Object Lessons, Lessons on
Number, Lessons on Form, liberally imbued with
Pestalozzianism. From this movement came, in
1836, the scholastic society which, under the name
of the Home and Colonial School Society, rendered
real service to English popular education. A sig
nificant proof of its importance is that Reiner, one
of its members, was chosen by Queen Victoria as
tutor to her children. And that Pestalozzi has
preserved some credit in England up to the present
time is shown by his being the only foreign educator
whom Mr. Herbert Spencer mentioned by name in

1 Sullivan, an inspector of Irish schools, wrote that the germ
of all the ameliorations which he introduced into the primary
instruction of his country is to be found in Pestalozzi's works
(Papers on Popular Education, Dublin, 1863).

110 PESTALOZZI

his book on Education; it is also shown by Pro
fessor Joseph Payne's devoting to him, in 1875, his
fine lecture entitled, Pestalozzi, the Influence of his
Principles and Practice on Elementary Education, one
of the most instructive studies written on the subject.
It would be impossible for us to follow Pes-
talozzi's influence everywhere it has penetrated. His
name, followed by his thought, has actually made
the circuit of the globe. One of his assistants,
Muralt,1 under the patronage of Czar Alexander I,
established an educational seminary for the higher
classes of Russian society at St. Petersburg, about
1815. The work of Uno Cygnceus, the Finnish
school reformer, is in part the product of his inspira
tion. In the New World as well as the Old, he had,
and still has, faithful followers. It was from Paris
that Pestalozzian reform was first transmitted to
the United States. A Burgdorf professor, Neef,
was appointed to teach in a Paris orphanage in 1803,
and his class was even honoured by an official visit
from Napoleon, who was accompanied by Talley
rand. Maclure, an American citizen, was present
at the interview and, being impressed by the results
obtained, he persuaded Neef to leave Paris for
Philadelphia, whence he afterwards went to New-

1 Von Muralt belonged to a noble family of Zurich; he lived
for several years in Paris.

PESTALOZZI 111

harmonie, to organize the Pestalozzian teaching.1
Later, the son of that Krusi who was Pestalozzi's
first collaborator at Burgdorf, emigrated to America,
and became professor of educational science in the
Oswego Normal School, whose founder, Sheldon,
introduced and applied sight teaching. Oswego
school, established in New York State in 1860, has
perhaps more than any other school influenced the
professional education of American masters. "This
was due," said the Monograph on the 1900 Exhi
bition, "to the practical application of Pestalozzi's
method and ideas by Sheldon, its principal." A
few years earlier, Lowell Mason, also an American,
made use of Pestalozzi's method for singing instruc
tion,2 as formulated by Pfeiffer and Nageli, two
Yverdon professors; and in a lecture several times
repeated before a crowded audience he expounded
Pestalozzianism to his fellow-citizens. Starting from
1835, a school journal, entitled The Pestalozzian,
appeared in Ohio. It was by Americans that Horace
Mann was called the illustrious apostle of Pestalozzi.3
Henry Barnard, in his important publications,
showed how highly he valued the experiments at
Stans and elsewhere. And again this year we read

1 See a pamphlet by Mr. William S. Monroe, Joseph Neef and
Pestalozzianism in America, Boston, 1894.

2 See the Pestalozzian Music Teacher, Boston, 1871.

3 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1892-1893, p. 1658.

112 PESTALOZZI

in an American journal: "The Stans experiment
was destined to effect a revolution in men's ideas
on education. ... It can be said with truth that
the present-day educational system is substantially
Pestalozzian." 1

An entire and interesting chapter could be written
on the relations of French thought with Pestalozzi.
We have already mentioned the efforts of Maine
de Biran, who especially prized the Pestalozzian
method because it tended "to develop equally for
all that faculty of reason which is necessary for all
ranks, and applicable to all the conditions and require
ments of human life." Bergerac school, organized
in 1808 with Barraud's cooperation, lasted, under
very varied forms, until 1881; like the Burgdorf
school, it quickly became transformed into a kind
of college for the middle classes. Maine de Biran,
who had been in direct correspondence with Pesta
lozzi, visited him at Yverdon in 1822; he found
that he had "deteriorated," and that he was ruled
by Schmid, of whom the French philosopher did
not form a favourable opinion. It appeared to him
that Schmid was merely "sharp." This enigmatical
personage whom, in his simplicity, Pestalozzi lauded
to the skies, whilst Fellenberg called him "Satan,"
and of whom M. Hunziker said to me a few months

1 The Teacher's Institute, February, 1901.

PESTALOZZI 113

ago, "Schmid was nothing but a windbag," was
received by France after the dispersion of the Yver-
don institution. About 1830, he and five other
Yverdon professors entered the Morin Institute in
Paris, where he gave lessons in mathematics until
his death, which occurred in 1851. He it was who
provided Philibert Pompee, the first director of
the Turgot school, with material for the preparation
of the paper which he submitted, in 1847, for the
competition opened by the Academy of Moral and
Political Sciences on the following subject : " A critical
examination of Pestalozzi's system of instruction
and education, considered principally in its relations
to the welfare and morality of the poorer classes."
A great many other facts could yet be mentioned
proving what attention France accorded Pestalozzi's
works.1 Let us recall the articles which Madame

1 Pestalozzi has rarely been attacked and criticised in France,
but the Pere Burnichon, a Father of the Society of Jesus, did
assail him. What grieves me in this affair is that I occasioned
these attacks, which were especially intended to be unpleasant to
me. Twenty years ago I ventured to write that Pestalozzi was
"famous," — a belief in which I persist, — and that he well de
served a place in the front rank of the men who have done honour
to the fine name of teacher. Thereupon the Pere Burnichon de
clared war against poor Pestalozzi, of whom he dared to say that
"he was deficient in brains." There are many people whom
we might wish to have as much ! And he added that " he was but
little known in France," proving chiefly that he himself did not
know him, especially when he defined the Yverdon institute as
"a kind of agricultural colony."

114 PESTALOZZI

Guizot wrote on Pestalozzi in 1813, for the Annales
de I'Education, in connection with Jullien's com
mentary ; — the report which Cuvier drew up in
1815, after a visit to Yverdon, where he had been
sent by Carnot the minister; the creation of a
Pestalozzian school in Paris, in 1822, by Professor
Boniface, who had taught the French language at
Yverdon, from 1803 till 1817, whose grammatical
studies also have long been classics in France.
Neither should it be forgotten that the Societe pour
V instruction elementaire inscribed Pestalozzi among
its corresponding members, and that one of his
friends, Prefect Lezay-Marnesia, under his inspira
tion established, in 1810, at Strasbourg, the first
normal school in France. Our great historian,
Michelet, in 1870, rendered him most eloquent
testimony when he said of him that he was "a flame,
a life," that "he improvised men," and that he
was "a true saint." It was another Frenchman,
M. Guillaume, who wrote, a few years ago, a book
which is the best biographical study on Rousseau,
even if it be compared with that written by M.
Morf.1 And before M. Guillaume, Pestalozzi had

1 M. Morf, director of the Winterthur orphanage, collected a
large number of original documents relating to Pestalozzi. Be
tween 1864 and 1867 he published a whole series of detached studies,
and he devoted to him a most interesting and complete biography,
in four parts, which appeared in 1868, 1885, and 1889.

PESTALOZZI 115

in France for panegyrists Augustin Cochin and
Philibert Pompee, without forgetting Rapet, who
had shared with Pompee the prize of the Academy
of Moral and Political Sciences, for a monograph,
still in manuscript,1 to which the Pedagogic Museum
at Paris owes a collection of Pestalozzian books
which can rival that in the Pestalozzianum at Zurich.

Time has not effaced Pestalozzi from men's
memories. In 1871, Zezchwitz acclaimed him as
" the hope of the German people in evil days." In
1873, Wiesinger discoursed on the part due to him
in the renovation of the German people. Finally,
in 1885, Wienner published a manual of pedagogy
on Pestalozzi's principles.

The importance attached by educational theorists
to the work of the humble teacher of the people
is proved by a whole series of books. In these he
has been in turn compared with the most celebrated
of modern educators. The Pere Girard said, " His
tory will one day draw a parallel between the two
Swiss pedagogues, Rousseau and Pestalozzi." His-

1 It is to be regretted that Rapet's monograph has not been
printed. His work is superior to that by Pompe'e, who shared
the prize with him. The Academy gave £120 to Rapet and £80 to
Pompee. Rapet informs us, in his unpublished notes, that there
was a thought of awarding the entire prize to him. But this was
in 1848, and Giraud, the correspondent, gave him to understand
that £200 would have seemed "too aristocratic a reward."

116 PESTALOZZI

tory has not failed to do so. How often the Stans
teacher has been compared with the author of
Emile in pamphlets and in large volumes.1 There
is hardly an illustrious pedagogue to whom he
has not been likened. Here we have a little book
entitled, Comenius and Pestalozzi, considered as
Founders of the Popular School; 2 another in which
Pestalozzi's principles are compared with Froebel's ; 3
a third, in which the resemblances between Pesta-
lozzi and Diesterweg are examined;4 others again,
in which the relations of Pestalozzi's method with
Francke's,5 Fellenberg's,8 and Herbart's 7 are studied.
But it is not alone the study of Pestalozzi's gen
eral theories which has continued to preoccupy
the friends of education. Practical workers have
not ceased to look to him for directions concerning
the various divisions of primary education. Let
us mention, for example, Exercices et travaux pour
les enfantSj selon la methode et les procedes de Pesta-
lozzi et de Froebel, published in 1873 by Madame and

1 Herisson, Pestalozzi, eleve de Rousseau, Paris, 1886; Hunziker,
Pestalozzi und Rousseau, Bale, 1885 ; Schneider, Rousseau und Pesta
lozzi, Bromberg, 1866 ; Zoller, Pestalozzi und Rousseau, Frankfort.

2 Hoffmeister, Comenius und Pestalozzi als Begrunder der
Volksschule, Berlin, 1877.

3 Fr. Beust, Die Grundgedanken von Pestalozzi und Froebel,
Zurich, 1881 . 4 Balster, Dortmund, 1846. 5 Kramer, Berlin, 1854.

6 Hunziker, Langensalza, 1879.

7 A. Vogel, Herbart oder Pestalozzi f Hanover, 1887.

PESTALOZZI 117

M. Charles Delon; several manuals of elementary
arithmetic, a small work by H. Ruppert, On the
Application of Pestalozzi's Method to the Teaching
0} Mathematics, which appeared at Langensalza,
in 1879 ; a treatise by the Englishman, Tate, which,
since 1850, has passed through several editions, under
the title of First Principles of Arithmetic based on
Pestalozzi's Principles; and again, The First Year
of Pestalozzian Arithmetic, published by Hoose,
the American, in 1882. Let us finally mention, from
a more general point of view, the Cahiers de peda-
gogie d'apres les principes de Pestalozzi, compiled
in 1879 by the Swiss pedagogue Paroz.

Our list is by no means complete.1 If it be true,
as Mr. Herbert Spencer said, that the Pestalozzian
idea is yet to be realized, it is not the fault of the
innumerable commentators who have attempted
to develop it. We cannot call to mind a thinker
who has traced so deep a furrow in the conscious
ness of humanity. But whatever the interest of
the publications which his memory has called forth,
it is to himself that we must return, if we wish really
to know him; it is in his own writings, his actions,
and the virtues of his character that we must seek
the causes of our admiration for him, his democratic
mind and his popular soul.

1 See also Pestalozzi und Luther, by Schlimpret, 1864.

VIII

CERTAINLY we must not expect to find models of
literary elegance, or studied composition, or even
connected and concise reasoning in Pestalozzi's
numerous writings. His thought is confused, dis
connected, and obscure; his style often strange.
Incapable of governing men, he was no less unable
to control his ideas and to master the tumultuous
flood of his fancies. Vivid but disordered con
ceptions whirled through his brain. Nothing could
be more incoherent, for example, than the com
position of his Lettres a Gessner, and yet these form
the best of his works. Sentimental effusions of an
overflowing heart, apostrophe and invocation in
prophetic and declamatory language, incessantly
sever and break the irresolute thread of reasoning.
One feels that the author is growing weary and that
he finds it difficult to follow up the theoretical dis
cussion on which he has embarked. His imagina
tion is continually breaking loose and wandering.
At every moment he is obliged to leave the long
digressions in which he strays: "I resume my

118

PESTALOZZI 119

explanation; ... I return to my subject." Com
parisons and figures of speech abound and over
whelm the thought with the whimsicality of their
confused fancies. Thus, in the space of a few pages,
he likens himself, in turn, "to a sailor who has lost
his harpoon and attempts to catch whales with a
hook/7 when he wishes to express the disproportion
between his means and his object; "to a straw
which would not provide hold for a cat," to proclaim
his lack of importance ; to an owl, to portra'y his
isolation; to a reed, to illustrate his weakness;
to a mouse afraid of the cat, to describe his timidity.
From all this confusion and verbal chaos, however,
flashes of sincere, true eloquence shine forth at times.
If Pestalozzi is defective in the abstract presenta
tion of general ideas, he makes up for it nobly in
his imaginative works. In them he shows himself
a clever narrator and an exquisite painter of manners.
With Leonard et Gertrude he inaugurated the popular
novel; he created a style which has not found suffi
cient imitators, and of which he himself could not
follow the inspiration in Christophe et Else, another
of his works, which is nothing but a wearisome and
ultra-didactic commentary to Leonard et Gertrude.
But in his " first book for the people," in the innocent
simple pictures which he traced of village life, there
are really exquisite pages. No surprise is felt at

120 PESTALOZZI

learning from Madame de Stael that she shed tears at
certain passages, — when reading, for example, the
touching scene in which the old dying grandmother
obtains from her grandson the restoration of some
potatoes which he had stolen. This beautiful book,
which has been lost sight of too much, is also recom
mended by the portraiture and character analysis
which it contains.

In it Pestalozzi displayed great subtlety of obser
vation. Nothing could be more delicately studied
and described than the moral physiognomies of the
seven children of Gertrude, the perfect mother,
whose sons and daughters have all the failings com
mon to their age. Although the plot of the novel
is not in itself intricate, it is blended with amus
ing anecdotes, comic episodes, and touching scenes
which save it from being devoid of interest. The
eternal struggle between good and evil is there set
out : the representatives of good are honest labourers
whom the announcement of a few days' unhoped-for
work is sufficient to delight, a simple, good pastor,
and a generous, kindly lord ; whilst evil is incarnated
in an unjust bailiff, who is at the same time a none
too scrupulous publican. "I have long thought,"
said Pestalozzi, — who would perhaps have occasion
to repeat his words if he lived at the present day, —
"that a bailiff or mayor should not be a publican

PESTALOZZI 121

by trade. ..." Directed especially against the
public house and drunkenness, the novel of Leonard
et Gertrude has a high moral value, the importance
of which has not diminished with time. The three
last parts, although they do not offer the same
dramatic attraction as the first, deserve, nevertheless,
to be preserved from oblivion; for, in telling the
story of the regeneration of a village, they present,
as it were, an advance scheme of all the economic
and moral reforms which have transformed the
condition of the rural populations of Switzerland
in the course of a century's constant progress.
Sensibility and imagination, beyond all doubt,
play the most prominent part in the majority of
Pestalozzi's writings. But a ready wit is also ap
parent in them. A teacher of Berne, with whom
I recently had the pleasure of conversing, whilst
pointing out to me the pointed nose and thin lips
in a portrait of Pestalozzi, said: "Do you see?
Pestalozzi possessed the ironical faculty. ..."
An unexpected criticism, which, however, contains
a certain amount of truth. Was not Socrates, a
believer and an enthusiast, the father of irony?
In the same way, Pestalozzi, sentimental as he may
have been, was not wanting, at times, either in deli
cate sarcasm or biting raillery. Take the Manuel
des Meres itself, that elementary, infantile book:

122 PESTALOZZI

you will find in it a number of pungent observations,
which would not be amiss in the work of a moralist.
" Lawyers talk a great deal, especially when they
are pleading a bad case/7 -"Many women who
examined nothing but their mirror in their youth,
prefer to examine their cash-box once they are mar
ried." - "Men and women speak the more as they
think the less. . . ." The impress of Pestalozzi's
satirical vein is to be found more especially in his
Fables, in which he brings before us lords and
peasants, as well as animals and plants.

Do not let us take him for a scholar, with a re
stricted, narrow mind, confining himself to ques
tions of method and pedagogical procedure. His
thought often rises above the school and class room.
We must not regard as wholly unworthy of atten
tion the reflections contained in his philosophical
book, Recherches sur la marche de la nature, which,
of all his writings, as has already been said, gave
him most trouble, — he was at work on it for three
years, — and of which the lack of success grieved
him deeply. In it he distinguishes three elements
in the human being : animal man, social man, and,
lastly, moral man, which is the work of individual
ism and will. In it he expresses himself strongly
on the rights of property. The origin of property,
says he, whether legitimate or otherwise, should

PESTALOZZI 123

not weigh with us. Property is sacred, since it
exists. We ought to respect it because we form
a society. But, on the other hand, Pestalozzi com
plains that property-holders do not fulfil all their
duties. In their selfishness they forget the unfor
tunate and the poor, who, having the same natural
right to property, yet do not share in it ; they forget
them, excepting when they require them to undergo
military service or to pay taxes.

Pestalozzi's thought was generally governed by
wisdom and good sense, but at times he used the
language of utopianism. For example, he attacked
printing, cursing it as the cause of all the evils from
which society is suffering. It has turned away the
eyes of man — • the eyes, which are the principal in
strument of knowledge, — from the instructive and
fertile spectacle of the actual universe, to fix
and hold them on the dead letters of loquacious
and barren books. He also attacked the Protestant
Reformation, because it allowed ignorance and
stupidity to speak on questions of theology which
the human mind will never solve.

Penetration was not lacking in Pestalozzi. Lively
as was his sympathy with the French Revolution,
he could recognize its faults, condemn its excesses,
and foresee its consequences. "Either," said he,
"it will respect the liberty and rights of all citizens,

124 PESTALOZZI

or else it will come about that the opposing minority,
richer and craftier, will soon succeed in once more
subjugating an imprudent and disordered majority,
which those formerly in power persist in regarding
as a band of escaped slaves." Rousseau had fore
told the Revolution thirty years in advance: as
early as 1793, Pestalozzi was prophesying the re
newal of hostilities by the old regime, the Empire, and
also the Restoration.

An ardent, burning eloquence often directed
Pestalozzi's pen, and a touch of poetry was added.
He spoke of his misfortunes and his painful destiny
with as much pathos as the author of the Confes
sions, when recounting the trials of his life. But
it is especially when he deals with education and
the interests of humanity that his solemnly implor
ing voice becomes animated and excited. "We
have," cried he, "schools for reading, writing, and
catechism; but we have not the essential, schools
for forming men. . . . Modern civilization resem
bles the colossus of which the prophet speaks.
Its head of gold ; that is, the arts, in which it excels ;
it touches the clouds. But popular instruction,
which ought to be the basis and support of this
magnificent head, is like the feet of the statue,
it is made of the coarsest and most fragile
clay. . . . The people of Europe are unhappy

PESTALOZZI 125

and orphaned: let us give them at least a
mother! . . ."

The writer, in Pestalozzi, is confused and incom
plete ; numerous defects spoil the qualities. But the
man is beyond compare and is almost entirely made
up of virtues. I am not speaking only of the purity
of his morals, nor of his devotion and abnegation,
nor of his activity which scarcely knew repose, nor
of his courage: the Zurich schoolboy, laughed at
by his comrades, was, nevertheless, the only one
who, one day of panic, when the rumblings of an
earthquake shook the walls of the school and the
occupants of the class rooms fled in fear, ventured
to go back into the building and quietly remove
his books. But what examples he has left, more
especially, of active, superhuman charity, pushed
to excess, as at Neuhof and Stans. He it was who,
accosted by a beggar, and not having a halfpenny
in his pocket, made him a present of the silver buckles
of his shoes, and returned to Zurich with his foot
wear gaping, badly fastened with straw. He it was
who, bringing away from a friend's house some
money, which, in a moment of distress, he had gone
to borrow, met on the way a poor peasant who was
lamenting the loss of a cow, and he despoiled himself
for the man's benefit. . . . Only once was Pesta
lozzi rich, and even then it was merely anticipation.

126 PESTALOZZI

When Cotta, the publisher, opened a subscription
for the publication of his complete works, it met
with great success. Kings and philosophers has
tened to bring their offering: so that Cotta could
undertake to pay Pestalozzi about £2000 for his
rights as author. But this wealth — expected
rather than realized, moreover, for Cotta did not
fulfil all his engagements — was only a fresh op
portunity for Pestalozzi to display his admirable
disinterestedness. In one of those speeches which
he loved to deliver in the presence of his assembled
household,1 on the 12th of January, 1818, he declared
that he intended the money which was promised
him to go to various scholastic foundations, to a
normal school for men and women teachers, to one
or more elementary schools, and, lastly, to the
continued improvement of all means of instruction
and domestic education for the people. And as
his grandson, Gottlieb, who had returned to Yver-
don a short time before, was present and listened
to this solemn donation which robbed him of the
most definite portion of his inheritance, Pestalozzi,
turning to him, said: "You returned into our midst
and said to me: 'Father, I want to be what you
are. . . .; These words made me happy. Neither

1 It was from 1808 to 1818 that Pestalozzi formed the habit of
delivering every year, in solemn gatherings, Discours a sa maison.

PESTALOZZI 127

gold nor silver can make you what I am. ... My
heart alone made me what I am. . . ."

The unhappy great man inspires in those who
study him closely an admiration mingled with
compassion. The material security of existence
was often denied him. In 1781, he had no money
for the purchase of paper to compose his immortal
books, and he wrote Leonard et Gertrude on the
margins of an old account book. In order to live
he was reduced to selling the medals awarded him
by the philanthropic societies of Switzerland. He
walked "like a somnambulist in the world of busi
ness. . . ." If one penetrates into his private life,
it is impossible not to be touched by all that he had
to suffer from his associates, and even from his
family. Assuredly he could not have dispensed
with his collaborators, who, by their acquirements,
remedied the gaps in his education ; he spelled badly
and was not sure of himself in the four rules ; with
justice could he say, " If Buss, Krusi, and Tobler
had not come to my assistance, my theories would
have been quenched in my heart, like the stifled
flames of a seething volcano which cannot find a
vent. . . ." And yet what disillusions, what mor
tification and bitterness, came to him from his asso
ciates, whose slave he became, who were his tyrants,
and grieved him by their hatred? "We founded

128 PESTALOZZI

this house on love, and love has disappeared from
our midst ! . . ." At times he rose in revolt and
used hard words to describe masters whom yet he
loved: "Jullien is a superficial Frenchman; Krusi
is a lazy dog ; Schmid behaves like a wild ass. . . ."
Did he at least find in his life's companion a com
plete consolation for his sorrows, his afflictions, and the
loss of his only son ? It is to be doubted. Madame
Pestalozzi was doubtless a devoted and generous
wife, ready to sacrifice her patrimony to meet the
expenses of her husband's hazardous undertakings.
But she does not appear always to have sustained
him with her confidence and surrounded him with
her care. During the toilsome years of the Neuhof
enterprise she absented herself frequently, visiting
her friends' mansions, staying there several months
at a stretch, and leaving the unhappy man to strug
gle alone in the midst of difficulties of every kind.
After the troubles and failure of Neuhof, she be
came uneasy and distrustful, reasonably so we
must confess. A few words written by Pestalozzi
to her, from Stans, in 1798, throw much light on
this point: ". . . If I am worth what I think, you
may rely on receiving help and support from me
before long. But in the meantime, be quiet. . . .
Each of your words lacerates my heart. I cannot
endure your eternal incredulity. You have waited

PESTALOZZI 129

thirty years: wait another three months! . . ."
At Yverdon, Madame Pestalozzi lived apart in a
corner of the castle, hardly joining in the life of the
institution and her husband's activity, dreading the
noise and agitation. Ramsauer, who was decidedly
the scandal-monger among the Pestalozzians, nar
rated some details which reveal singular peculiari
ties in the relations of husband and wife. Pesta
lozzi only sat at his wife's table when expressly
invited by her. Ordinarily he shared his pupils7
meals. To make up for this he was expected to
play cards with her every evening. They could
not remain together for ten minutes without quar
relling. And yet it was affirmed that they loved
each other tenderly. When Madame Pestalozzi died,
on the llth of December, 1818, the survivor was
deeply afflicted. Let us, however, note these reflec
tions of a woman friend of theirs who wrote some
days before Madame Pestalozzi's death: " There are
in them two distinct souls. In her will die a be
loved wife and worthy companion, but not a part of
Pestalozzi's ego."

In the isolation of his last years, struggling with
a thousand cares and in financial embarrassment,
Pestalozzi suffered still more. Let us not pity him
too much, in spite of all. In the consciousness of his
duty done and the joy of his partly executed work, he

130 PESTALOZZI

more than once enjoyed heart-felt peace, what he
himself called " paradise upon earth." He knew
the grandeur of his design, and he found a few hours7
happiness by devoting his entire life to the happi
ness of others.

He dreamed more than he accomplished, and sowed
more than he harvested. We are told that, during
his walks, he gathered stones and minerals by the
handful, filling his handkerchief and cramming his
pockets with them; then, when this unmethodical
collector returned home, he put them haphazard
in a corner, and never found time to classify and
catalogue them. This in some degree represents
what he was in his intellectual life, heaping up ob
servations and accumulating experience, without
ever succeeding in organizing a body of doctrine.
The nobility of his aspirations and the beauty of his
aim, more than power of execution, the effort rather
than the result, was what characterized him and
constituted his worth. As is very justly said by
Mr. Herbert Spencer, who of all his forerunners in
educational matters mentions Pestalozzi alone, in
his book on Education, " Pestalozzi's mind was one of
partial intuitions." As he himself admitted, "I did
not know what I was doing; I only knew what
I desired. . . ." He desired humanity to be en
nobled through instruction. "The only way of

PESTALOZZI 131

putting an end to the social disorder, the fermenta
tions and popular revolutions, as well as to the abuses
of despotism both of princes and of the multitude,
is to ennoble man." He was sustained by an ardent
faith in the natural forces of humanity and the power
of education, but his optimism was not absolute.
Rarely, said he, is man good. He added, however,
that this was the fault of his bad instruction, as
man only becomes man by instruction. And like
Rousseau, beyond the misery and vice of existing
society, he hailed the coming of a good and happy
humanity, restored to itself by the effect of a uni
versal education conforming to the laws of nature.
"I believe," said he, "in the human heart, and in
that belief I walk on ploughed-up ground as I would
walk on the firm paving of a Roman road."

To estimate equitably a man's merit and the value
of a work, it is necessary to restore the setting, the
environment in which the man lived and in which
the work was attempted. To judge of the impor
tance of Rousseau's attempts, let us make allowance
for the wretched state of education in his time.
" Despite the fine appearance of civilization, so
much vaunted, nine men out of ten are dispossessed
of the right belonging to every man living in society,
- the right of education." Knowledge, still a privi
lege of the richer classes, does not enlighten the

132 PESTALOZZI

poorer classes. " The more I observe the people, the
more I am certain that the broad stream of education,
which in books seems to flow for them, evaporates
in the village and the school into a dark, damp mist."
After a hundred years of progress, it is easy to
deride the insufficiency and poverty of Pestalozzi's
plan of instruction. If we would be just, let us think
what primary studies were in Switzerland at that
time, " on what a quicksand the cankered schools
were built," with what pupils, and also with what
teachers, Pestalozzi had to deal. Let us recall how
Krusi, his first collaborator, became a teacher.
Krusi was eighteen years old in 1793. He was a
hawker by trade. One day, on the highway, he
met a functionary who said to him point-blank:
"Wouldn't you like to be a teacher? There is a
situation vacant in the school at Gais." — "But I
know nothing," replied Krusi, naively. . . . His
interlocutor was not discouraged. "You will easily
learn what a teacher can and should know in our
schools." Krusi made up his mind, and sat for the
regulation examination. "There were two of us
competing," he narrated. "The principal test con
sisted in writing the Lord's prayer. I set about it
as best I could. I had noticed the use of capital
letters in German writing and distributed them
liberally, even in the middle of words. When the

PESTALOZZI 133

examination was over, Captain Schoefer, who
decided the contest, told me that my competitor
read better than I did, but that my writing was
better, in short, that I was successful. . . . How can
we help being indulgent towards teachers recruited
from the highways and scarcely able to read and
write? . . . How avoid indulgence also towards
the educator who, for the accomplishment of his
great schemes, had as auxiliaries only masters barely
reclaimed from rusticity, who had themselves to
be instructed and formed before they could in their
turn form the pupils confided to their care ? Pesta-
lozzi was not wrong when he said, "The teaching
actually in use seemed to me an immense swamp,
which I crossed by resolutely plunging into the mire."
Everything then remained to be done in order to
institute the elementary school, the people's school,
the modern school, such as a hundred years of effort
have hardly succeeded in organizing in civilized
countries. Pestalozzi sketched out the work, and
those who have continued it cannot forget what they
owe to the heroic impulse given by him. He con
ceived the universal school, open to all children, and
distinct from the church. Pestalozzi was the first,
in order of date, of the lay teachers. In the last
parts of Leonard et Gertrude, he boldly subordinates
the pastor to the schoolmaster. And he gives as

134 PESTALOZZI

his reason that laymen alone are in a position to
prepare men for family and social life. Summariz
ing a conversation between a clergyman and a teacher,
he concluded in these terms : "Thus the man, whose
power came from his knowledge of the world, spoke
to the priest whose weakness was due to his lack of
such knowledge."

Poor, strange, great man, at once puerile and
sublime, awkward in his manners and gestures, but
admirable in his intentions and actions ! His con
temporaries ridiculed and derided him at times.
At Zurich, his school-fellows called him a "queer
chap"; his neighbours at Neuhof described him as
a "crank"; his friends themselves, grieved at his
lack of practical ability, said that he would die in
a poorhouse or a lunatic asylum. But insult,
derision, misadventure, and adversity, all glanced
aside from his intrepid mind, without cooling its
ardour or disturbing its valiant serenity. He went
on to the end, smiling at privations, asking only
to live under a thatched roof, there to pursue
his dream, insensible to reverses, indomitable and
patient. At the same time he was modest, recog
nizing that he was only seeking to put into practice
"what good sense had taught men for thousands of
years," and not hiding from himself the imperfec
tions of his unfinished work. "Examine," said he,

PESTALOZZI 135

in the Schwanengesang, his pedagogic testament, —
"examine everything in what I have proposed, and
retain what is good. If some better conception has
ripened in your minds, add it to what I have striven
to offer you in a spirit of truth and love; but, I
pray you, do not reject the whole work, in its en
tirety and without examination, as though it were
a chimera condemned beforehand. . . ."

No, his aim was not chimerical. If he did not
reach it, he showed his successors the road by which
it could be reached. He did not forget himself in
vain reveries. Rousseau, with his visionary hu-
manitarianism and his platonic outbursts, seems
small beside this active philanthropist, who did not
rest content with writing, but acted and made his
acts conform to his thoughts. Let him not be se
verely judged because he could not define his method
with exactitude. He himself was the method, with
his animation and his indefatigable enthusiasm.
He remains "a unique man/7 as his friend Lavater
said. His life was not wasted, if only on account
of the examples which it has left us; and not in
vain did his heart beat for the same idea during
sixty years. If what Raumer called "his all-power
ful love" could, whilst he was alive, conquer all
who approached him, his sentiments can still com
municate themselves from afar to men's minds, give

136 PESTALOZZI

rise to noble emulation, and beget fine teaching
careers. In any case, whatever its deficiencies,
his work remains the product of a reason, superior
at times, always and everywhere waited on by
infinite tenderness.

Queen Louise of Prussia, in transports of admira
tion for Pestalozzi, said of him: "How that man
loves humanity! ... I thank him in humanity's
name." All posterity should associate itself with
this grateful homage, and thank him, in the name
of that ignorant humanity which he wished to edu
cate and in the name of that poor, suffering human
ity which he wished to raise and succour, by teaching
it industrial work, thrift, and honesty.

One day, Pestalozzi, looking out upon the pictu
resque scenery of the mountains and valleys of his
native land, exclaimed, "Yes, nature is beautiful,"
— and where could this be said with greater truth
than in Switzerland, that country on which nature
has lavished her marvels, and has given to the Alps
lakes which bathe their feet, like so many mirrors
in which to reflect and multiply their beauties, —
"yes, nature is beautiful, but there is something
more beautiful than nature and her earthly splen
dours, and that is the human heart."

Yes, we say, when it is the heart of a Pestalozzi.

BIBLIOGEAPHY

ONLY the principal authorities are mentioned here, the works
which have been indicated at the foot of the pages being omitted.

In the case of Pestalozzi 's own works, reference is made to
the complete editions only.

fcdition Cotta, Sdmmtliche Schriften, Stuttgart and Tubingen,
1819-1826, 15 vols., 8vo. — Edition Seyffarth, Sdmmtliche Werke,
Brandenburg, 1869-1872, 18 vols., 12vo ; a new edition, prepared
by M. SEYFFARTH, has been in course of publication since 1899.

There is also a collection of (Euvres choisies (AusgewdhUe
Werke), by F. MANN, Langensalza, 1869-1870, 4 vols.

Translations into French : —

Manuel des meres, translated from the German, Paris-Geneva,
1821. — Leonard et Gertrude, translated from the German by the
Baroness de Guimps (the first part only), Paris-Geneva, 1832. —
Comment Gertrude instruit ses enfants, translated from the Ger
man by DR. E. DARIN, Paris, 1882.

Commentaries and biographies in French : —

M*** DE H***, Precis de la nouvette methode d'education de
M. Pestalozzi, etc., Paris, 1804.

CHAVANNES, Expose de la methode elementaire de H. Pes
talozzi, suivi d'une notice sur les travaux de cet homme celebret
son institut et ses principaux collaborateurs, Paris, 1805.

LE P. GIRARD, Rapport sur I'institut de M. Pestalozzi, a
Yverdon, etc., Fribourg, 1810.

JULLIEN (de Paris), Precis sur I 'institut d 'education d'Yverdon,
1 vol., 8vo, Milan, 1812; second edition, Paris, 1842, under
the title : Expose de la methode d'education de Pestalozzi.

137

138 BIBLIOGRAPHY

RAYMOND, Lettre sur I'etablissement d'education d'Yverdon,
fonde et dirige par M. Pestalozzi, 1814.

DE THON (Mme. Adele), Notice sur Pestalozzi, a pamphlet,
Geneva, 1827.

MLLE. CORNELIE CHAVANNES, Biogmphie de H. Pestalozzi,
1 vol., 8vo, Lausanne, 1853.

PAROZ, Pestalozzi, sa vie, sa methode et ses principes, Berne,
1850.

ROGER DE GUIMPS, Histoire de Pestalozzi, de sa pensee et de
son ceuvre, 1 vol., Lausanne, 1874.

POMPEE, titudes sur la vie et les travaux pedagogiques de
J. H. Pestalozzi, Paris, 1878.

AUGUSTIN COCHIN, Pestalozzi, etc., Paris, 1880.

L. VUILLEMIN, Souvenirs, Lausanne, Bridel, 1880.

J. GUILLAUME, Pestalozzi, Aude biographique, Paris, Hachette,
1890.

A. PINLOCHE, Pestalozzi et r education populaire moderne, Paris,
Alcan, 1902.

Refer also to Psychologie de I'effort by M. A. BERTRAND, at
the chapter on le Biranisme applique a I' education, Paris, 1889;
in the Revue pedagogique, to the articles by M. MARTIN, on
Greaves, November, 1886; by M. PAULIET, on I'Ecole pestaloz-
zienne de Bergerac, April, 1890; in the Bibliotheque universelle
et Revue suisse, the article by M. E. NAVILLE, Pestalozzi et Maine
de Biran, April, 1890. — Consult lastly Rapet's manuscripts,
which are preserved in the Musee pedagogique: 1st, a Memoire
of 800 pages presented to the Institute in 1847 ; 2nd, a collection
of notes made by Rapet from that date until the last years of
his life.

Works in German : —

The list of German publications will be found in the bibliog
raphy compiled by M. Guillaume at the end of his fine book, in
the Catalogue des ouvrages du Musee pedagogique of Paris, 1886-
1889, and in the Catalogue of the Pestalozzianum at Zurich.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 139

We will confine ourselves to a few references: — •

RAMSAUER, Kurze Skisse meines pddagogischen Lebens, Olden-
bourg, 1838.

BLOCKMANN, Pestalozzi, Zuge aus dem Bilde seines Lebens,
etc., Leipzig, 1846.

H. MORF, Zur Biographic H. Pestalozzis, 2 parts, 8vo,
Winterthur, 1865-1866. — Pestalozzi und seine Anstalt in der
zweiten Hdlfte der Burgdorfferzeit, Winterthur, 1885. — Einige
Blatter aus Pestalozzis Lebens und Leidens geschichte, Langen-
salza, 1887.

K. VON RAUMER, Geschichte der Pddagogik, etc., 4 vols., 8vo,
Stuttgart, 1846-1854. The part devoted to Pestalozzi has been
translated into English by Tikierd, London, 1855.

OTTO HUNZIKER, Geschichte der schweizerischen Volksschule,
3 vols., Zurich, 1881-1882, Vol. II, and various other works.

MORIKOFER, Die schweizerische Literatur, Leipzig, 1861.

Works in English : —

BIBER, Henry Pestalozzi and his Plan of Education, etc.,
1 vol., 8vo, London, 1831.

HENRY BARNARD, Life, Educational Principles, and Methods
of John Henry Pestalozzi, articles reproduced from the Journal
of Education, 1 vol., 8vo, New York, 1859.

REV. DR. MAYO, Lectures on the Life of Pestalozzi, London,
1850.

H. KRUSI, Pestalozzi, his Life, Work, and Influence, 1 vol.,
8vo, Cincinnati, New York, 1875.

JOSEPH PAYNE, Pestalozzi, the Influence of his Principles and
Practice on Elementary Education, a pamphlet of 20 pages, Lon
don, 1875.

R. HEBERT QUICK, Educational Reformers, New York, 1893.

WILLIAM H. PAYNE, Contributions to the Science of Educa
tion, New York, 1886 (Chap. XIV. The Teacher as a Philan
thropist).

370.92 P476 C737P cl

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Pestalozzi and elementary
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